Mr President, Mr Vice-President, Gentlemen.
 

Thank you very much for the opportunity to speak to you this evening. It brings to an end a short but intensive visit to Delhi.

I do not intend to speak at any length. You run the risk of having a former university teacher slipping back into a hard wired mode to give you a fifty minute lecture or a one semester course, even a full master's degree in telecommunications policy. A social event such as this, is an occasion for brevity and, where possible, wit.

I have had the opportunity to meet officials in the Department of Telecommunications, the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India and, this afternoon, the Minister of State, Shri Tapan Sikdar. I have also met with representatives of a number of trade associations. Some of whom are here this evening.

It has been an extremely useful visit, even if it will take me a few days to sort out all that I have learned. Just as you think you have unraveled some aspect of telecommunications regulation you discover another twist, some rule or custom of which you were unaware. You are never finished learning.

India has elected to pursue a path towards convergence in regulation. I am far from clear why it has chosen or been pushed in this direction.

Convergence of technologies is easy enough to explain. One day everything, except our dinner this evening, will arrive in a single bitstream of Internet Protocol packets. Yet regulating content is a necessarily a sensitive and political game. We can see the problems with Signor Berlusconi in Italy and Mr Thaksin in Thailand. Standing between a politician and his television broadcast is a dangerous spot.

Ensuring that "broadcast" content is fair and balanced is impossible, someone always feels hard done by. It is especially fraught in a country with so many languages, cultures and religions. I should keep silent on the supposedly unifying effects of colonial English.

Ensuring that unsuitable content is excluded is verges on the impossible. One man's unsuitable content is another man's premium service.

Merging the regulators may make things more and not less difficult. It is especially risky where there is no solid tradition of neutral regulation.

There was a long discussion about the convergence of regulation in Ha Noi last week at the APEC Telecommunications Working Group. It is a subject that everyone was aware of, but all were approaching very cautiously. They recognised that things could go horribly wrong.

The United States was the exception which has had a converged regulator for more than seventy years. However, it is also unique in having a two party system. I believe India has closer to thirty parties in its Parliament and more who want to be there.

One of the functions of INTUG is to take user views to bodies such as APEC TEL. We also also reports back by electronic mail, providing an analysis of the issues and debates between governments. Wherever possible we provide access to documents. This spans the International Telecommunication Union (ITU), the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) and the Comisión Interamericana de Telecomunicaciones (CITEL). Even if India does not participate in these bodies, TUGI and its members have access to the debates and issues being addressed at them through INTUG. They also influence what is being. All of this is on our web site.

Our contribution to those fora as it is in India or any other country is the ability to reflect the realities of the market.

Liberalisation of telecommunications alone is not sufficient. Opening up markets to competition is insufficient. Incumbent operators have to be regulated asymmetrically, that is a posh way of saying they need one hand tied behind their back if others are to be able to compete with them.

It also requires a powerful but restrained independent regulator. Someone able to act quickly to intervene to block anti-competitive moves by the incumbents. To stop what one of my Australian colleagues calls, in rather colourful language, the "bastardry" of the incumbent operator. Of course the Australians have only one incumbent  to your three.

One of the most stark questions I have faced this week is try to understand the discrepancy between India and China. India proudly announced that it had passed 6 million mobile telephones in the newspapers this week. Yet, China added that many in the six months from August to January and did so again in one month, in February, to reach a total of 156 millions. Admittedly, that was a month containing the new year and especially propitious time to buy or to give a mobile phone. It is now the largest mobile telecommunications market on the planet and growing at a substantial rate.

The explanation seems to lie in the Chinese perception that mobile telecommunications was a potential import market that had to be controlled and turned into an export opportunity. This it has done very successfully. India, on the other hand, seems to have treated mobile phones as the toys of an MTV generation, almost as a bourgeois fashion accessory. Instead of import substitution a variety of heavy taxes were imposed on hand sets creating a grey and reputedly a black market in smuggled phones.

Mobile telephone was not seen as a way to reach those without a fixed telephone line. Yet that has been its success in countries as diverse as Lebanon, Kampuchea and Madagascar. The count of mobile phones now exceeds fixed phones in Latin America, a continent increasingly dominated by mobile telecommunications.

Soon in Asia and Latin America we will face the challenge of providing access to the Internet which is purely wireless. There will be no cable modem or ADSL service to fall back on.

A further challenge has been the lack of success in data centres. We cannot yet say a failure.  However, this is a much more predictable result given the long story of leased lines. The provision of leased lines remains a problem for some companies, especially those operating outside the hot spots of Bangalore and the technology parks. The licensing conditions and the surcharges imposed by the operators remain something peculiarly Indian, reflecting an isolation from the practice in the rest of the world.

I am told the relaxations or IT-enabled services licences will help this. I trust it will.

Once again my thanks to you all for the very kind welcome to India and to Delhi, for the hospitality this evening.

I look forward very much to returning to India in the coming months to help TUGI become a more powerful voice in Indian telecommunications. I know that my colleagues in INTUG will be keen to visit and bolster your efforts. Ensuring the creation of truly competitive markets for telecommunications in India is in everyone's interest.
 

This page is maintained by the webmaster.

Last updated 20 March 2002.