There is, for instance, the thorny question of how to justify the expense of installing transmission towers in areas where people can only afford to pay as little as US$2 per month for phone service - not to mention the cost of running and servicing equipment where electricity and engineers are in short supply.
That is where VNL, a new, privately funded Swedish-Indian telecom equipment maker comes in. Cofounded by Anil Raj, a Stockholm-based mobile industry veteran who held key roles at Ericsson and Sony Ericsson, VNL includes a dozen of the engineers and executives who created the digital-mobile technology known as "GSM" (global system for mobile communications). They have turned their expertise to the challenge of making mobile networks that are vastly cheaper, simpler and less power-hungry than anything ever before devised.
