RIL eyes tie-up with Aadhaar for broadband venture ………Adith Charlie
Reliance Industries is now eyeing a tie-up with the Unique Identification Authority of India for its newly formed broadband venture.
Company officials feel that RIL’s long-term evolution (LTE) networks will help the UID in connecting with various service providers such as banks and financial institutions and help in solving the last mile connectivity issue.
In his speech to shareholders at the RIL AGM, Mr Mukesh Ambani, Chairman, made a passing reference to the UID project, now rechristened Aadhaar.’
It (RIL’s broadband endeavour) will empower India by providing easy and broad access to crucial infrastructure including UID
, he added. Once the company gets the initial networks in place, it plans to dial the Nandan Nilekani-headed UID.
Aadhaar’ will authenticate every Indian in terms of his or her identity based on bio-metric verification. With a massive information base of 1.2 billion people and the ongoing collection, validation, issue and constant verification of identity, project Aadhaar will require one of the most complex IT architectures ever created and a software implementation that would become a benchmark for years to come.
If a farmer having a UID card approaches a bank for subsidies, the bank will have to connect with the UID server for verifying the credentials of the farmer. Since RIL now is talking about 4G and wireless broadband, we expect the process to be faster compared to other wireless networks, sources said.
LTE Deployment
LTE technology promises to deliver speeds of up to 10 mbps compared a maximum of 3 mbps by currently available technologies such as 3G and WiMax.
However, analysts are not convinced regarding the timing of the LTE deployment, given that it is still in a development stage.
Though RIL is taking a prudent step by via the asset-light approach, other than the execution risk, the primary risk is the LTE technology itself, which though promising, is still evolving and could take a longer than expected time to mature. The second one would be whether the market is ready for 4G services, said Mr Satyender Khatter, Analyst, Elara Capital.