|
Idhries Ahmad
BANGALORE: The telecom industry in India continues to register impressive figures with record subscribers being raked in every month in boom. However, this growth doesn’t register directly with traditional fixed line operators who face the same set of challenges as are faced by their counterparts in the rest of Asia Pacific and the world.
Traditional behemoths like BSNL continue to lose a major chunk of their subscribers to the mobile partners. Around six million subscribers were added to the mobile subscriber base in the country in the last month though the fixed line telephony service providers showed a falling customer base.
Also, existing fixed subscribers are showing their backs to the traditional behemoths by surrendering their lines in favour of mobile telephony or using VoIP (mostly illegal) to communicate, causing loss of revenues to the fixed line service providers.
On the other hand, though the mobile operators are adding to their kitty, they have not been able to show a substantial increase in their Average Revenue Per User (ARPU). Moreover, with mobile operators continually failing to provider standard voice quality in the dense pockets, they stand at a huge risk to lose subscribers in the long run.
At this point of time, Fixed Mobile Convergence looks very promising to both wireless and wireline networks.
FMC or Fixed Mobile Convergence essentially entails the convergence or confluence of fixed-line and mobile wireless technologies such that service providers can seamlessly blend two or more of these technologies to deliver enhanced user experience over a unified framework.
FMC helps reduce churn in wireline networks as now users can have seamless connectivity with the network, with their dual mode handsets that can hook on to Wi Fi and GSM networks.
Calls can be routed both over the broadband network and on the mobile network depending on the location of the user at that particular point of time. This in turn will help the mobile network operators in decongesting their mobile networks by offloading some traffic on the fixed networks.
This will result in more efficient utilization of the spectrum resources (that is quite stretched today) for handling additional mobile calls (voice/data) and/or provide better network experience, he adds.
Very feeble attempt to acheive FMC
Though the fruits of convergence are self evident most existing operators are preferring to take a cautious approach as there is lot of confusion in the market regarding the technology readiness, regulatory environment and user acceptance for FMC services. The service providers are little hesitant to launch these services as they feel this will lead to cannibalization of existing revenues.
The FMC industry expects every major service provider in India to have commercial launches of some form of converged communication within the next 12 months.
Most of the major operators in India are expected to have commercial launches of some form of converged communication within the next 12 to 18 months. Although not strictly under the banner of FMC, the service providers have begun pilot trials with IMS – that serves as a foundation stone for the FMC services.
Bharti Airtel Limited, one of India’s leading private sector providers of telecommunications, joined FMCA (Fixed-Mobile Convergence Alliance) in November 2006 to share the knowledge of convergence developments and launches.
The company is the process of evaluation and shortly will conceptualize the service offering for Indian market. This is being planned for during this year. Subsequently , Airtel will showcase the same to understand the user experience and gather user feedback to fine tune the product offering.
"The company is in discussions with the solution providers to understand the capabilities of FMC offering to arrive at a right value proposition to the customers. Technology evaluation for delivering fixed mobile convergence (FMC) including both network portion and testing of dual mode handsets is under way" reveals AIrtel spokesman.
Airtel in order to realize this offering is discussing several initiatives and some of them include promotion of WiFi routers for broadband customers, Creation of WiFi hot-spots and zones in strategic locations like Airports, malls etc.
|
