Citigroup Venture Capital promoted You Telecom is now planning to provide broadband services over WiMax. You Telecom’s You Explore is in talks with Maxis owned, Aircel for the infrastructure.
Mr. Charvarthy of You Telecom said,
Initially, we will offer the services for the SME sector and later move on to enterprise and residential use.
Earlier, we reported about Sify’s WiMax launch. When contacted Sify’s corporate office in Chennai, they said that it is initially targeting Corporate and SMEs. Entry cost for Home users would be way too high.
You Telecom is planning to offer Video Telephony but is hindered by the high cost of instruments which are currently pegged at Rs 17,000. Video Telephony never picked up amongst consumers. My guess is with deployment of 3G, one may then opt for video calls. However, 3G mobile handsets such as Nokia N70 and others are easily available at prices cheaper than Rs 17,000.
You Telecom claims that it currently has 140,000 broadband subscribers in 11 cities – Ahmedabad, Bangalore, Chennai, Gurgaon, Hyderabad, Mumbai, Navi Mumbai, Pune, Surat, Vadodra and Visakhapatnam.
