The provision of Mobile Broadband in rural and remote areas will help India bridge the so-called ''digital divide''. It will improve productivity, help overcome the constraints of transport infrastructure and provide much needed services such as banking, health and education.

The GSM Alliance today said that India would become the second-largest mobile broadband market globally within the next four years with 367 million mobile broadband (mobile broadband technologies include WCDMA, HSPA, LTE, TD-LTE, TD-SCDMA, CDMA2000 1X EV-DO) connections by 2016, overtaking the US, which will account for 337 million connections.  However, India will still be second to China, which will have reached 639 million connections in the same period, said GSMA in its press note.

Since 3G licenses were first awarded to mobile operators in India in September 2010, mobile broadband connectivity has grown steadily, with over 10 million high speed packet access (HSPA) connections across the country, and this is expected to grow exponentially, by 900 per cent, to more than 100 million connections in 2014.  This will make India the largest HSPA market worldwide within the next two years, surpassing China, Japan and the US in the process, GSM Alliance says. ''The mobile industry in India is set for immense growth as mobile broadband technologies such as HSPA and long term evolution (LTE) start to proliferate, but there is scope for far greater development,'' says Anne Bouverot, director general of the GSMA.

Bouverot adds, ''To take full advantage of this, the Indian government should facilitate the timely release of additional spectrum in a fair and transparent way for all stakeholders. The benefits are clear to see – a 10 per cent increase in Mobile Broadband penetration could contribute as much as $80 billion (Rs3,506 billion) of revenue across the country's transport, healthcare and education sectors by 2015.''