Stripping the situation down to bare essentials, the challenge and opportunity for the ICT industry is to make best use of the limited spectrum resource. India is an excellent incubator due to the price-sensitive, highly competitive market environment and socially conscious regulatory and government environment.

This is greatly amplified due to the evolution of wireless technology, convergence with information technologies and markets, and growing reliance on ICT to serve as the lifeblood of societal, environmental, and economic transformation. To compel best use, greater and level access, capital investments must be harnessed effectively. A way to help assure that is to build into the regulatory environment, commercial development and market acceptance the rate plans that fit public awareness and acceptance with the true costs of delivering the service across a range of requirements.

If we turn our attention to how competition has developed in the United States and many other parts of the world today, we see that operators are being vised between the needs to continuously upgrade network technology and deployment density while being pushed to lower per unit pricing. Even though capex expenditures can become a diminishing return, operators are pressed by a conspiracy of their own making to offer rate plans that stress unlimited voice and messaging services and high or no bandwidth caps. Whats more, operators must build networks for peak capacity while advertising devices and applications that tend to raise peak demand during particular time periods. The US FCC, emboldened by public network neutrality advocacy groups, can take on an extreme positions on use methods to screen PtP file sharing or other uses of QoS mechanisms to reduce the burdens on traffic, even if the intent is to utilize bandwidth limits only during peak demand periods. While the goals of regulation is to provide an even playing field for alternative service providers and applications, the affect is to raise the costs of operation and services and reduce the quality benefits to all classes of users.

The US Supreme Court struck down the FCC’s attempt to regulate a gross level of open access on Comcast, sending the regulator back to the drawing boards in their pursuit of open access and extension of BB to rural and under-served segments of the population. A better approach would have been and now makes more sense than ever is to acknowledge the need for operators to do ‘traffic shaping’ but requires open access for similar classes of service. This framework policy would allow ICT operators, whether wired or wireless, to offer rate plans that include tiered service levels, and offer incentives and limits that help to shift usage to portions of the network that can best and more cost efficiently handle additional traffic.

India is an excellent incubator for the international development of this, what I consider, enlightened approach to regulation of technology and markets. My wish is that this ‘movement’ prospers and stimulates innovations that inspire adoption in other countries. From a broad perspective, India is positioned in this regard to be the world leader.

-Robert