For those of you who may have followed the Indian telecom industry closely before, even pre-TRAI days had efforts to open up circles in India to competition which brought many interesting telcos from around the world into India. Without an independent regulatory body, there was much uncertainty, litigation, etc and many were burnt from this Read More

Congratulations Mr Hamadoun Toure, for being elected Secretary General of the International Telecommunications Union (ITU) Congratulations to Mr Hamadoun Toure, for being elected Secretary General of the International Telecommunications Union (ITU) and Mr Houlin Zhao as Deputy Secretary General. Both of them have served in the ITU for the last 8 years and have made Read More

After having come in 3rd then 4th in the first two round of votes for the position of Secretary General, Mr Marc Furrer has pulled out of the race. Swiss Info Mr Hamadoun Toure from Mali, who has been the elected Director of the Bureau for Telecommunication Development for 8 years, received 72 votes after Read More

The Secretary of Telecom, Shri Mathur, heading the Indian delegation to the ITU Plenipotentiary Conference in Turkey, addressed the other delegates at the conference and said that India was the five largest telephone networks in the world. It has more than 170 million telephones and taking efforts to provide telephone connectivity all over India. He Read More

As the industry moves quickly from triple play to quad play, the NTL/Virgin Mobile merger brings a new twist to the industry- great personalities like Sir Richard Branson, who cleverly turned a boring telecom term “quadruple” or “quad” play, into Four Play- cheeky given that the NTL/Virgin merger will be rebranded as Virgin! It seemed Read More

The ITU is holding its once in every four years conference in Turkey for the next 2-3 weeks to elect a new management team, and lay out a new framework for its policy making and actions over the next 4 years. From what I know, the candidates for: Secretary General are -Mr Hamadoun Toure (current Read More

There are many barriers to introducing triple play (fixed voice, data and vide0) and quadruple play (voice, data, video and mobile). In some places, it is regulatory issues (as each service is licensed differently) that is not allowing for easy cross pollination or convergence of services. In other cases, it is the lack of business Read More

Very interesting to read about telecom liberalisation efforts in Africa. Uganda Communications Commission has announced that it will completely liberalise telecom provisioning in Uganda now that an exclusivity license has expired (see http://allafrica.com/stories/200611010423.html ) Meanwhile, South Africa that had already liberalised, seemed to be moving towards creating a new state run operator. Interesting comments on Read More

As discussions of quad play, triple play etc are being discussed and debated, it is interesting that note that not all debates have the user at the core. Each wireless, mobile and wired services currently meets differing needs and it is unclear if studies can indeed predict the future of usage and deployment where one Read More