At Sri Lanka Telecom Summit 2010:

Innovative ideas needed to invest in Telecom Industry

A nation needs a strong broadband backbone to deliver the technology to all segments of the society said chief regulatory advisor and director government affairs of BT (India) (Pvt) ltd Shri Satya Gupta. He was addressing Sri Lanka Telecom Summit 2010 in Colombo last week.

Explaining the shape of the national broadband network, Gupta said that it should be similar to the road network or other public utilities and not owned by a single company. Public private partnership is a better model but it should be owned by the government. Otherwise it is not a national broadband backbone, he said.

He said, expanding the mobile network is not a problem but expanding the broadband network is a problem. In many countries like US, UK and Singapore there is a strong government intervention in this area.

Gupta said that investing in Next Generation Network (NGN) is the way forward. There are two important advantages in the NGN; IP based approach and the layered approach. In NGN every element should be IP or packet based. Packetisation increases efficiency to extremely high level and after packetisation you can deliver any information, data, voice or video, at zero cost. Same time layered approach brings the flexibility to the network.

Fixed line operators all over the world have been pushed to NGN to survive. Advantages of the NGN are networks become simple, reduced locations and there are lot of cost savings. It unloads the value and the capacity of the network infrastructure. Since finding capital expenditure for the convergence is an issue, the government or the regulators should invest in NGN.

He said that telecom companies have to find innovative financing models in this economic downturn time. Last week Sri Lanka Telecom said that it earned a loss in the third quarter of 2009 leading to a loss in 2009. Similar things happened in India as well.

Many companies that have invested all their money on mobile technology have not given adequate returns. Mobile alone will not keep you up running and therefore, putting all money into mobile and not for fixed and other connectivity has become a wrong decision. Innovative ideas are needed to invest in the telecommunication industry, he said.