Indian telecom industry prepares for new 3G regime

NEW DELHI, INDIA: Highlighting the current mobile content and services market shift, IAMAI organized the National Conference on Mobile Content & Services in New Delhi.

Industry experts came together and emphasized the need of their preparedness for the upcoming 3G regime for Indian telecom industry.

With the 3G spectrum auctions just round the corner, the event was a timely platform to have serious dialogue on how the industry sees a massive push towards data and services as opposed to voice.

TV Ramachandran, Secretary General, Cellular Operators Association of India (COAI), said: “Operators still have limitations with regards to 2G in addressing the consumer demands of new data usage patterns. Undoubtedly, 3G holds a lot of prominence for the consumer of mobile services. In order to support the upcoming growth from mobile value added services the industry needs a clear spectrum policy which should cover both 2G and 3G.” However, he also emphasized the need of affordable mobile broadband.

While highlighting the need of regional content based SMS services, Nadeem Akhtar, Senior Research Engineer Centre for Excellence in Wireless Technology said: “Looking at Indian mobile users context only 37 percent of urban population uses text messages. Some factors effecting the SMS penetration are: lack of multilingual content, secondly user friendliness of the mobile device with regards to text messages generation.”

Akhtar further emphasized on the need to define suitable mechanism of handling legacy devices and need to showcase a prototype of new technologies like Unicode Technology of text messages.

While acknowledging the fact of mobile broadband and wireless growth going to happen in near future, Sangeeet Chowfla, Executive Vice President, Comviva added: “Adoption of services like navigation, location based mobile services, mobile internet across the world where 3G services have already forayed. The revolution is about to come in India as well. All we need to do is to come up with India specific services which would also require services to be delivered in Indian regional languages.”

Debasis Chatterjee (CEO, Netxcell) reiterated that the key thought of the day is to understand the need of the customer at a greater depth and subsequently provide a mix of technology as per the needs and requirements of the consumer.

He also stressed on the importance of the ease of usage at an affordable price. For doing this a complete integration of the eco system by diff stakeholder is required.
The one day event was attended by the who’s who of the mobile content and services players, Mobile VAS companies and professionals from the industry. The forum highlighted the industry preparedness for the new 3G regime.

With the 3G spectrum auction almost coming up, the event has witnessed some key resolutions and takeaways for the industry to manage this new mobile technology arena.