TSP to DSP: New mantra for telcos?

GURGAON: The telecom sector is at the cusp of a transforming phase as it shifts its focus from voice to data and as the fear looms large that most of the operators are at the risk of becoming irrelevant few years down the line.

And such fears call for innovation and out-of-the-box ideas to stay afloat in the businesses. Keeping in mind, the OTT threat, falling ARPUS, the telecom industry stakeholders believe that it is high time that the telcos should think of transforming themselves from telecom service providers to digital service providers.

At a roundtable discussion held recently, under the brand Telecom 1, a joint initiative of Voice&Data and technology giant Cisco, industry experts discussed ways on how telecom operators should gear up for their journey from voice to data.

Sanjay Kaul - Managing Director, Service Provider Business, Cisco India & SAARC, said that certain technologies such as cloud and software-driven open systems economic, cloud and virtualization could be leveraged by service providers to stay afloat in their businesses.

Some were of the view that wi-fi could play an imperative role and reduce the burden on the already scared spectrum, while one school of thought spoke about more and more collaboration in the industry.

But arguing the fact that not only technological innovation will help telcos to turn them into digital service providers, one of the stakeholders said that there is a challenge with respect to resources in the country. “In our country, we have 2,000 customers per site as against 300 per site globally, the question remains that how to make the resource available to the entire populace.”

At the same time, they also opined that every disruption has an opportunity and the good thing about data, unlike voice, is that the usage of data is all throughout the day and that can actually help them to normalize their costs and that's why the EBITDA of many operators have seen some improvements in the recent past and data will continue to improve the bottomline and topline of the operators.

The discussion also revolved around Digital India and how service providers can play a role in it. The participants believed that active involvement of regulators and government will help in fructifying projects of such large scale.

Rob Sewell, CIO, Aircel, Sridhar Krish, COO, Tikona Infinet, Seshagiri Rao, Director Marketing & Network Planning, Railtel, Ravi Badwal, Head-Emerging Business, Viom Networks, Vikram Tiwathia, Deputy Director General, COAI, Mudit Agarwal, BIO, Mobility, Tata Teleservices, Prameet Jaaj, Lead Business IT (products/New Business), Tata Teleservices, Rajat Mukarji, Head-Corporate Affairs, Idea Cellular, Pradeep Kumar Agarwal, Director, BBNL, Bijendra Yadav, CTO, MTS, Arvind Bali, CEO, Videocon, Ravi Gautam, BD-Enterprise Voice & Collaboration Solutions, Tata Communications were some of the key participants.

V&D-Cisco second roundtable is slated to take place in Mumbai on October 16th.