What trends do you foresee in the Indian telecom space in the next two years?
A number of trends are expected. These include:
- Mergers and acquisitions will take centrestage and the industry will witness consolidation. Also, the number of active operators will decrease.
- Spectrum sharing arrangements will be chalked out and MVNO-centric activities will increase.
- Talks will be held between the government and operators for active infrastructure sharing
- An increase in broadband commissioning and services will be witnessed
- The uptake of value added services will increase
What will be the basic growth drivers of this growth?
- Mobile Data
- Enterprise Solutions
- Cloud Services (though not substantially)
What will be the impact of NTP 2011?
- The policy will focus on enhancing broadband uptake
- Easing the process of mergers and acquisitions
- Speeding up the process of convergence
- Growing the equipment manufacturing and R&D segments in telecom
What are the unresolved issues and concerns in the telecom industry?
NTP 2011 has emerged more as a framework. It still needs a lot of consultation to make most of the issues highlighted into a workable plan and operationalising it. Also, the timelines for meeting targets are too far in the future, i.e. 2015 and 2020.
What is your regulatory wishlist?
- A uniform license fee
- Infrastructure sharing between various telecom operators
- Specifying the scope of NLD and ILD licenses
- Classifying telecom as an essential service
- Enhancing the security and monitoring of enterprise usage. The government should clearly specify the security/lawful monitoring and interception requirements as applicable to enterprise data services especially to cater towards MPLS, IP-VPN services
- Interconnectivity and infrastructure-sharing between other service providers
