Delhi Session I: Accelerating growth beyond technologies and beyond geographies

Shyamal
Ghosh: We have to achieve 200 to 250 million by 2007. If you disaggregate
this figure, we have to increase from about two million subscribers a month to
four million subscribers a month. And this cannot be done only in urban areas.
We have to move out to muffassil and move out to the 70 percent of the country.

Rural services over will have to go for the most optimum solutions, both in
terms of switching network, and access facility. Affordability will be a key
issue. Therefore, wireless technology will provide lot of exciting possibility.

There will certainly have to be infrastructure sharing. It does not make
sense duplicating infrastructure providing services in an area where the costs
have to be kept at minimum. Affordability is the key issue. Outsourcing is the
name of the game, whether it is manufacturing or service providing.

(L—R) NK Goyal, president, TEMA Navneet Saluja, CEO (Delhi), Reliance Infocomm SD Saxena, director (finance), BSNL Ibrahim Ahmad, editor, VOICE&DATA Shyamal Ghosh, administrator, USO fund CS Rao, president and CEO, Lucent Technologies Hindustan

SD Saxena: Indian telecom has one of the most unique infrastructure
growths in the world. People look at my revenues but they don't look at my
capex involved. My capex is Rs 100,000 crores. In four years, we have added Rs
40,000 crore to the network and Rs 40,000 crore had been generated. All has been
ploughed back in the network.

We lose a lot of money in rural telephony but we will continue to go into
those geographies because service is our main intent. Whether we get money or
not, will we go ahead and add another 30 million phones in the rural areas where
nobody has gone before.

Navneet Saluja: I really believe what makes difference is convergence.
We are able to get voice and data into one handset, which I call half computer
and half mobile.

NK Goyal: There is no doubt that growth in the telecom sector has been
tremendous and we will also achieve the 250 million target by 2007. Apart from
telecom, this country also needs employment. For employment we cannot be
dependent on service sector alone. For employment problems we have to increase
manufacturing.

AK Sinha, CMD, BSNL lighting the lamp. Also in the picture are Pradeep Baijal, chairperson, TRAI and Ibrahim Ahmad, editor, VOICE&DATA

CS Rao: Our role here is to offer and enable the operators-be they
incumbent or private service providers-so that they are able to have an
infrastructure that is future proof, that is optimized, that makes them have
very minimal initial investment, protects that investment and we need to enable
them to have incremental investment so that the new services and new
applications can be rolled on the same infrastructure at very little increment
investment.

Shyamal Ghosh: The PCO model of BSNL was a success as it was
outsourced. Similar models could be adopted for reaching out to the rural areas.

Navneet Saluja: In terms of accelerating growth, I think the biggest
barrier the country faces in telecom is the cost of the handset and that needs
to really get addressed.