Using the “Slumdog” title in the Telecom story is not to just attract attention. It’s really a great title for the Telecom Industry in India, which has been a great story for 18 plus years now, and continues to get bigger and bigger in the Telecom success stories of the world.
Despite the extraordinary growth with the market (with over 850 million subscribers) there is continued debate amongst the network operators, policy makers, politicians and technologists. All the commotion is not all that bad with the Indian Telecom market and it for sure makes great reading. There were endless delays with new spectrum auctions, allocation of spectrum to the already approved operators, debates on value of the 3 G spectrum, more committees to decide on future, BSNL and MTNL continuing to get preferential deals, bickering amongst the CDMA and GSM operators, TRAI and DOT differences and whatever that can be remotely controversial is all on the table.
While the world has gone through a peak period of valuations and now working through a recession and perhaps back into an upswing, the value of more people connected in India will help with the overall economic growth. India has been thriving even the worst years of global economic slowdown. New opportunities for expanded role of more Indians to add to the GDP growth of the country will keep this momentum in positive indices while the world will work its way back into overall positive growth.
The 30 paisa per minute termination of a call rate that is being debated between old and new network operators also should be dealt with quickly.
Incumbent’s verses new entrants should not be dealt as an adversarial situation, rather than combining the strengths to offer the best value for customers. The market should drive the pricing rather than regulation.
The early entrants have enjoyed the benefits of lower pricing on their license fees, albeit they also risked the uncertainty of the markets. But the unchanged policies which are older than 6 years and over 500 million users ago should be dealt with the reality of today. People have recovered their initial outlay of capital and the new entrants have a bigger outlay today with lower revenue per user, and by trying to impose mechanics established many years ago in today’s environment may not be the most positive way for serving the current needs.
Twelve years have passed since National Telecom Policy NTP'99 and many changes have taken place thereafter. Action have been initiated to formulate a comprehensive NTP 2011. NTP 2011 will cover issues pertaining to licensing, spectrum allocation, tariffs/pricing, linkage with rollout obligations, and flexibility within licences, spectrum sharing, spectrum trading, mobile virtual network operators, unlicensed bands as well as mergers and acquisitions.
As part of the new policy, telecom would get infrastructure sector status, heralding tax breaks for companies and helping the domestic telecom equipment manufacturing industry.
Rural education, mobile banking, video and voice transmission and many other areas of communications will become more prominent with higher speed wireless networks. More mobile value added services will be introduced with the new networks and will create more opportunity for developers.
It is time for all agencies and individuals to stop poking at the process and let the market define itself. There is a need to grow employments and new networks will bring in hordes of opportunities in engineering, sales, development, towers and a whole slew of new VAS development.
The Indian Telecom market is ready for continued success. Success despite the bureaucratic shenanigans and technology lobbying is simply a matter of fact. Just imagine the economic and intrinsic benefits when the subscriber count crosses 1000 million in a couple of years? The benefits of well connected India with people communicating with the world will yield untold benefits to the overall economy of the country. Let the market have access to all available spectrum and let the users have the choice of technology. Let the users choose from a variety of choices of networks. Let everyone in India get connected and prosper.
