Making mobile networks cheap and green

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.

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