The information age is driven by the need to spread information—synonymous with knowledge or content. But many a time, this need is shadowed by the broadband and the convergence hype, or the more visible, investment-intensive fat optical pipes, and the broadband access technologies. And when they do not fill up, comes the disillusionment. The discontentment.

There are many sceptics—even from advanced telecom markets—scoffing at broadband being a non-event. In quite a contrast, we have markets like Korea, Singapore and Hong Kong, reporting broadband home-penetration ranging from 15 to 40 percent and growing fast. Between these extremes, we can find the differentiating factor that happens to be the ‘content’—the most important ‘C’ in the convergence of communication, computers and content. An appropriate content to suit the local requirements and to meet the local expectations.

Content Brings Revenue

Access—and for most of the awakened societies, it is broadband access—is becoming just another plain vanilla service. What is important to consumer, for which he or she is prepared to pay an extra buck, are the services, applications or the content riding on it. The bottle or the cart that carries it is losing importance, what is more important is the wine within. With the advent of broadband, we are getting into the world of ‘content communication’ from that of ‘communication’.

Content Explosion All Over Asia-Pacific

The tremendous success of telecom—both mobile and broadband—all over the Asia-Pacific, i.e. in Korea, Japan, Hong Kong, Singapore, and now, China, has at its center a huge determined effort to develop local content. We have many lessons to learn from the way ‘i-mode’ (Japan) and ‘magix’ (Singapore) went about catalyzing the process of content development. The motivation was clear: content is the pre-requisite for any knowledge-based society. And for any country with a huge creative skills pool, that should be the first goal, an undoubted opportunity to encash.

This mind-boggling content growth also brings up the issue of growing digital divide, looming large to grow now at broadband speed. One finds it uneasy to see many discussions focused on dangers of content regulation rather than on ways to promote content creation.

A New Business Model

In this new business scenario, voice will have an increasingly lesser role to play with reducing revenue streams. Whether one believes in it or not, more and more revenue will come from content transactions. So, billing will have to be done by content attributes rather than by time, distance or access to the network. It is going to be a new paradigm. Today’s Call Data Records (CDRs) record the conversation events and not its content. There is an emerging need for platforms and multimedia content-delivery systems over broadband, as well as solutions for billing, content and customer management. Technology will also need to catch up.

Niraj K Gupta www.telecombyNirajGupta.com