Let's Make 2013 Cheerful!

2012 was gloomy, but let's try to make 2013 cheerful! Not an easy task but if everybody does their bit it can be achieved. I believe that to make the telecom industry cheerful, the government and the regulator should play a proactive role. The government should be seen as pro-industry and should focus on how to achieve the objectives of NTP 2012. This mammoth task would not be achieved, be it on broadband or manufacturing, unless and until the government lays down phase-wise implementation of all the key objectives enshrined in NTP 2012.

The government should open up new frequency bands so that the industry can plan its activities in a comprehensive way. All this will help operators to plan their 2G, 3G, and 4G expansion in a planned way so that quality of service can improve and we do not get frequent call drops and there is a lot of clarity on voice and data. Somebody said that the industry needs more band than bandwidth if they plan to achieve broadband targets.

The much-publicized NOFN (national optical fiber network) needs to gain momentum and the government should roll out NOFN projects in full swing in the first quarter of 2013 so that we can see the infrastructure in place. All this will help service providers and VAS community to provide applications to rural community once the infrastructure is in place. Not only this, the operators can also get pipes to increase rural teledensity from present 35% to make it at par with urban teledensity.

Regulator needs to do a balancing act and needs to focus on consumer interest as well as industry interest without hurting anybody. The regulator needs to focus on roaming, mergers and acquisitions, and spectrum licencing in a more liberal manner so that the industry can come out of the crisis rather than help in creating another crisis. They have to relook at things which have not worked for them and then come up with plans which will help the industry move forward. More focus should be on how we plan to meet the broadband numbers quickly so that India can catch up with other developing economies.

At the same time, the service provider has to do a lot in 2013. The operator has to focus a lot on back-hauling and IP-fication of the network as all future networks be it 3G or 4G will be dependent on this infrastructure. If the infrastructure is not robust, the operators will not be able to provide quality voice and data to consumer and businesses. To make 3G and 4G successful, the operators need to be open minded so that they can tie up with application providers on a long-term basis as sustainability of future infrastructure will depend on what suite of applications are being provided to cater to different cross section of users be it consumers or business users.

Service providers should learn from 3G launches in the past and launch 4G services in cities where they can provide quality service at affordable cost and also provide good quality content which can attract users to latch on to 4G service. On the fixed side, operators will move towards NGN technologies. Focus would also be on FTTx technologies as this will help in providing quality speeds to end consumer while at home or at office. Entertainment will get a facelift with city and gram panchayat fiberization.

All this will help in benefiting consumers on the broadband side but we will see an increase in voice tariff. Consumers will also get increased quality of service for both voice as well as data and will also benefit from convergence of devices and convergence of technologies.