WiMAX Helping Asia's Farmers

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And the research firm adds another barrier is being created by an ongoing conflict between the country's two powerful regulatory agencies. As a result, Ovum suggests carriers expand their networks in smaller cities to maintain their growth in broadband connections.

Such challenges, however, haven't prevented vendors from moving into these markets, especially India. Alcatel-Lucent, for example joined with Indian service provider ITC in 2004 to establish a rural deployment called e-Choupal that involved installing computers with Internet access in rural farming villages. "Choupal" means "gathering place" in Hindi, and officials say the service serves as both a social center to exchange information and an e-commerce hub for local farmers.

The aim is to re-engineer the procurement process for soy, tobacco, wheat, shrimp and other crops in rural India. The result, however, also created an efficient, profitable e-commerce platform for IPTV that is also a low-cost fulfillment system for rural agricultural communities. ITC estimates that in its first year, the e-Choupal program saved approximately $280,000 on just a single crop, soya. The program has now expanded to tens of thousands of villages in India.

Paul Ross, director of corporate communications for Alcatel-Lucent's APAC region, says the program exemplifies how the company works with service providers in undeveloped regions of India to establish broadband community centers at locations throughout the country. Each center contains telephones, modems and PCs, and provides communities with voice telephone service, Internet access and links to electronic government, business, educational and agricultural services, including market prices.

"This kind of center is on the rise in different forms," says Ross, adding that is an example of how vendors and carriers are rolling out new and different services in under-served areas to cope with market saturation in urban regions.

"These are grassroots initiatives. You can definitely see there is a pent-up demand in these rural areas for telecom services," Ross adds.

Alcatel-Lucent engages in such implementations under its Broadband for All program in 130 countries. Southeast Asia is an especially active region.

According to its annual global broadband user survey released in June, Southeast Asia is emerging as one of the fastest-growing markets for broadband services and offers a largely untapped user base for service providers to grow their businesses. The survey found that broadband is at the early-adopter stage in Southeast Asia, compared to more developed markets like Japan and South Korea.

Those results dovetail with a recent Ovum research showing that broadband penetration of the entire population in countries such as Indonesia, Malaysia, Thailand, Vietnam and the Philippines is between zero and 3%, compared to 30% in Korea and 21% in Japan.

Like other vendors, Alcatel-Lucent has been active in the region, deploying a GSM/EDGE network for Indonesian service provider Indosat and providing a 3G/UMTS mobile network to CamGSM (Mobitel), a leading service provider in Cambodia. The Cambodia contract will allow integration of video telephony and streaming applications, including live streaming of mobile TV channels, into CamGSM's existing network.

Such advanced telecoms services likely will become much more common in remote regions as the rural revolution takes root during the next few years, potentially transforming the lives of millions of users.

"Internet access and voice communications will be the primary services," notes Yankee Group's Marshall. "People in the rural markets will benefit from having availability to information, the ability to communicate, which will have a positive impact on social and economic conditions for these regions."

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