Telecom regulator says delay in unified

Licence will slow new technology use

New Delhi, April 22: Adoption of telecom next generation network technology that could benefit users would be delayed if unified license for multiple services was not made available, TRAI Member D.P.S.Seth cautioned here.

Inaugurating the Next Generation Network seminar Dr. Seth said "chaos would follow" if new technology enabled different service to be delivered on one network while licensing continued to be for specific services. "Next Generation Networks would give you tremendous flexibility to the operator to provide all types of services" the regulator added.

Dr. Seth’s caution assumes significance in the context of the government delaying a decision on the TRAI’s six months old recommendations on unified licensing. Meanwhile, a number of disputes have already broken out between service providers inter se and with the DoT as different services have become overlapping on same platform due to technology changes.

The largest incumbent service provider, BSNL was planning addition of some 125 million lines in the next three years investing about Rs. 80,000 crores, said Shri S. D. Saxena, its Director (finance). But he pointed out that bringing in state of the art technology for the new lines was held up due to much of the new hardware being proprietory. Shri Saxena agreed that the Next Generation Networks would enable BSNL to provide "great flexibility and tremendous possibilities of many telecom products being given to customers." Major part of the huge investment would be in switching where new technology has induced radical changes in structure, hardware and costs.

"The NGN is giving not only flexibility to introduce a variety of value added services but also enables end-users to choose whatever service they want out of them by themselves today it is the operator who chooses the service he would give. In future it is the consumer who would determine the service he wants and could get from the network," Dr. Seth said. Bharat Exhibitions had organised the seminar on NGN that was sponsored by Sun Microsystems, global telecom and IT hardware and software major.

"The NGN is redefining telecommunications" said Chief Technology Officer of Bharti Infotel, Jagbir Singh. Domestic ICT spending this year was expected to be 17 billion US dollars out of which 40 per cent was on telecom. Bharti itself was planning an investment of $ 1.5 billion in capital expenditure. With corporations increasingly outsourcing non-core activities and new types of work like home based jobs coming into prominence, operators were facing new challenges " to fulfil changing demands of customers at lowest cost and greater reliability", Jagbir Singh said.

End-customers were asking for complex requirements with global footprints, Internet, extranet, voice and data and also different levels of requirements like normal and premium services in each category or combination of many requirements. This raised the level of challenge for operators who had also to protect current investment in networks while promising new levels of services to the end-user. Open standards were needed in interfaces to enable operators to build flexible networks that would meet different needs of various customers over the same network, the Bharti executive said.

Telecom experts from SUN Microsystems, Lucent Technologies, UTStarcom, Nortel Networks, and Veraz Networks apart from BSNL, MTNL and other telcos participated in the seminar. Diversity of services over a single network and end-user control instead of operator control of services were the major developments in the coming years, the experts said.

As for the character of the network, Kapil Sood, Director- Telecom, Sun Microsystems, detailed how the company’s products like servers were enabling centralized management of distributed networks reducing the need for manpower and lowering both capital and operating costs. New technologies like "predictive self-healing" which stopped accidents in the system before they happened were revolutionizing network reliability. Sun Micro’s Solaris 10 was not only 30 per cent faster than its earlier versions but had as many as 600 new features. Sun Micro executive detailed case studies where operators have achieved upto 50 per cent savings in capital and operational costs for Voice over IP networks by using Sun products.

IP (Internet protocol) networks meant convergence of both wireless and wireline technologies, according to Yogesh Bijlani of Veraz Networks. Tata Indicom’s Walkie was one instance of such convergence. He predicted that operators would be raising their revenues in future through IP based applications delivered on broadband carriers." We are going to see high trend in broadband applications in India" Bijlani forecast. However, expert panelists discussing the prospects for NGN usage in India were more cautious in view of the problem of dealing with legacy systems already with the incumbents like BSNL. Operators were yet to find out what were the customer needs and how much they were prepared to pay for different services before deciding on introducing more of the Next Generation Network equipment. The costs of such introduction and the likely revenue must also be considered before economic decisions would be made in.