It’s ironic that at Convergence India, access to WiFi in the conference halls was a real struggle. On the first day, the conference began on a positive note: Pradip Baijal, former chairman of the TRAI said that it’s not up to the government to choose between GSM and CDMA – the market should decide. Speaking against disparity in spectrum allocation, he said that the role of the regulator is to enable deployment of all technology to give the market the opportunity to choose.
Nikhil Jain, CTO of Qualcomm India said that mobile phones allow people to connect to information that is of use to them. 3G handset prices are nearing $100 and convergence is a key enabler of how we would connect Indian masses to information by delivering rich interactive media connectivity. On the other hand, 3G will enable operators to make money from both voice and data.
Brian Caskey, VP Marketing (Worldwide) for UT Starcom spoke about fixed line revenues falling across the globe. He said that the subscriber that is dictating change and forcing the industry to adopt a converged model. If TV doesn’t change to adapt to the needs of the Internet generation, it could become obsolete in 10 years. People want utility, ubiquity and affordability; Next Generation Networks (NGN) make convergence possible; one model is fixed-mobile convergence.
John Giere, CMO, Alcatel Lucent Worldwide feels that convergence is not a technology, it’s a service delivery environment; a platform that allows monetization of IP sessions as never before. India has innovated in the business model, and with personalization, a whole suite of experiences around advertising, commerce can be created – a combination of pay-per-view, on-demand applications and interactive advertising.
S.D. Saxena, Director-Finance at BSNL, recited a couplet (Hum so samajhe the ki baarish mein barse ki sharaab, aayi barsaat, to usne dil tod diya) said that there’s a lot of talk about convergence, but operators are often left dissatisfied due to lack of standardization – there needs to be convergence of software and platform. People are also talking about digital divide. In India, the situation is reverse – poor people are using the state of art technology: 7-8 percent of BSNL’s customers are businesspersons, 8-10 percent are among the youth, but 75 percent are using the phone for survival in a competitive environment. If you give technology to people, they themselves find out how to use it effectively.