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Day 1: Telecom Kings of SAARC
The Fifth CEO Conclave started to a packed house with CEOs of almost every operator in the SAARC region attending it to make their voice count in the regional gathering of the telecom industry. The SAARC report, which compiles all that has happened in telecom, in all member countries, was also released by Kanwalinder Singh, CEO, Qualcomm India and SAARC. The conclave also saw a brainstorming session in the form of a CEO roundtable, where the panelists were CEOs of various operators from the SAARC region.

The panelists included: AK Sinha, CMD, BSNL (the region's largest telecom operator); Shuhei Anan, CEO, Sri Lanka telecom; Suren J Amarasekera, CEO, Mobitel (GSM operator in Sri Lanka); Sultan Arfeen, chairman, Instaphone (mobile operator from Pakistan); Kanwalinder Singh, CEO, Qualcomm India; Jerry Huxtable managing director, Suntel; Nayeem Choudhury, chairman, WorldTel Bangladesh; Rekha Jain, Professor, IIM-Ahmedabad, Waheed Ismail, CEO, Dhiraagu, Maldives and Dr DPS Seth, former member of TRAI.

Starting the conclave, Pradeep Gupta, CMD, CyberMedia India Ltd said, "We are one land mass and one people. But above all we share similar challenges, the biggest of which is raising our economic status." He pointed out that all the countries had unique strengths and unique lessons to offer and, "Since telecom has been shown in numerous studies to have a positive impact on a country's GDP we must leapfrog ourselves with learnings from each other because all of us must aspire to give our citizens a better life."

Kanwalinder Singh said that in many places operators start out in areas with low ARPUs, however, they soon realize that telecom has elevated the economy of their subscribers and hence lesser markets become more lucrative. He suggested to operators that 3G technologies should not be reserved by them for their best markets, but should be put in most of the markets that the telcos operate in.

Speaking about next-generation networks AK Sinha said that incumbent operators were facing stagnant markets, and were looking to NGNs as their saviors. This trend of forcing content providers to stay only with one service provider was counter-productive to the market at large, as the need of the market is that more and more people should be encouraged to produce content for as large a number as possible.

The CEO roundtable discussed various issues threadbare with many participants taking contrary views, some even saying that a unified approach for SAARC was not only difficult but also undesirable. However, the CEOs agreed that there was need for greater cooperation. Rekha Jain pointed out that it is not enough to have roaming facilities across the nations, but also to let the services be available across borders, and that it is in the interest of the operators to cooperate not only about voice services but also data services. Singh reminded that GSM did not come about automatically, the operators had to cooperate to make that happen.

Talking about NGNs, Mark Hanna said whether we are ready or not, NGN is inevitable as manufacturers will stop supporting the traditional GSM infrastructure in a few years.

Nayeem Chaudhury struck a cautionary note on the 'inevitable' transition to NGNs, saying that all traditional infrastructure must be supported by the manufacturers as long as they were in use, to enable operators to leverage on the existing infrastructure as long as possible.

The path to new technologies is however unlikely to be rosy. As Sultan Arfeen said, "deregulation means more, not less, regulation," as in the current telecom scenario in SAARC, a regulator needs to regulate many more players than it had to earlier.

While Arfeen agreed with everybody that telecom in SAARC was going through an exciting time, he again cautioned, "In a flood you can also get carried away."

However, Shuhei Anan was positive about the region and said that network wise we are in a better position than we have ever been. We have strong capacities and the SAARC countries are connected to each other, something that was only a dream in the earlier times. But Anan added that we should try to develop the region as a whole. That is surely not an easy task, but he was willing to share Sri Lanka's experience with the words, "Sri Lanka was difficult to develop, but we did it."

AK Sinha was also optimistic about the future of NGNs in the region, saying that he expected 40-50% of the 65 mn 3G lines (after BSNL awards the tenders for the 3G lines) to be subscribed to in 2-3 years. On a SAARC-wide level he said BSNL was in talks with all the major operators of the region. And in response to the query that there was no roaming with Pakistan, he went on to say that roaming agreements were commercial agreements, there were no regulatory impediments to roaming agreements with any operator, and he could even sign the agreement the very next day.

While the big operators of the region were rolling out big expansion plans, it escaped nobody at the Conclave that the smaller countries of the SAARC region were way ahead of their larger compatriots in terms of teledensity. Waheed Ismail said that the spirit of SAARC was such that the big players did not look to take advantage of their smaller compatriots. He also added that smaller players gained immense advantages from associating with larger players and was all praise for Maldivian companies associating with Sri Lankan operators, and Reliance communications, as it allowed small players to play on a regional level.

Executives of companies that are leading South Asia's telecom juggernaut, listening with rapt attention to the proceedings of the inaugural session of CEO Conclave

Jerry Huxtable was the one sounding a cautionary note saying it was difficult to see how the region could develop as one unit, as all the countries had different challenges. He pointed out that the customer does not care about NGNs, he only cares about high speed services. And the region was still at a point in evolution where it had far greater challenges to tackle than the deployment of NGNs. He conceded that many regulatory solutions can be common among the various countries, but no single solution will work for all.

Suren Amarsekera, although an operator, said that many content providers in the region did not have access to large enough markets (in their national markets) to find an economical scale of operations, and that operating on a SAARC-wide level can give them that scale. The other burning need he pointed out was the lowering of roaming tariff between SAARC countries.

DPS Seth said though the demand for NGN network and services was picking up, the regulatory regime was lacking. He pointed out that despite all the talk of 3G in India neither the QoS parameters nor the interconnect parameters for 3G networks were still in place. Seth was sure that NGN would roll, because if only one big operator rolled it out, the smaller operators would be forced to take it up for survival. He was cautious on the hype about WiMax. He said while the technology held great promise, it was still a couple of years before it could deliver mobile broadband. Adding that the need for a service was NOW, he pointed out that 3G had the capability to deliver on that need today. Seth pointed out that talk of regional cooperation was fine, but it must be preceded by a national debate in all the respective countries, and the regional decisions should not be in dissonance with the international practices.

While operators and regulators on the panel raised the level of debate to lofty ideals and policy decisions, the concerns of the audience (consisting of CEOs and senior officials of telcos) were more routine. The main queries were on better roaming facilities among the different SAARC countries. Proof that what the telcos need to do is take care of the basic needs, because while they are talking of offering new services and higher QoS, even the basic need of being able to hold a conversation over 2G networks remains unfulfilled.

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