Joining the DoTs
By Tabrez Khan
Mumbai, 27 Aug 2008, 1345 hrs IST

The last week few weeks have been significant from a telecommunications standpoint with a slew of policy changes and announcements being made.
3G services were given the green signal, internet telephony was legalized in India, NLD, and ISD were freed from operator-specific restrictions and also a definite timeline for mobile number portability was announced. There's no gainsaying the fact that these moves are expected to have a profound impact on the industry and the players within.

Communications has assumed great importance within enterprises today and these moves will likely have a far-reaching positive impact on this enterprise function. Unified communications will certainly gain with the advent of 3G services. 3G is still at least a year away and there a number of factors that remain uncertain, for instance the pricing. But it is expected to be affordable and will benefit enterprises to a great extent.

Information and content will be more readily available to employees, and they can be more connected to the workplace, all of which will help raise productivity.

The freeing of Internet telephony has been another positive move that will help enterprises reduce the TCO of their communications solutions. Also unified communications can now be made more widely available and even smaller businesses can avail of it, while enterprises can scale up their communications infrastructure. Internet telephony is expected to bring down the cost of data, video, and voice transfer significantly.

The IT industry is also expected to benefit from the advent of 3G, as the demand for new mobile applications in the 3G space picks up. Also, IT hardware and chip companies can expect a surge in their order books as mobile manufacturing companies increase their output of 3G ready handsets.

All these moves are clear pointers of the government's intent to make the communications industry a highly competitive one so that businesses and customers can benefit. However, the government needs to address some issues such as high license fees for new entrants and more clarity in the M&A aspect of the 3G policy to facilitate participation from global majors. This will help serve the ultimate goal of the government's telecom policy better than retaining high entry barriers.