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“Still there is a long way to go for achieving launch readiness in terms of technology maturity, user awareness, product packaging, etc,” points a Bharti spokesman.
Other than Bharti, Reliance and BSNL are also belived to being enaged in trails though the company remains tight lipped about their initiatives and when they are going to roll out the product offering to the market
Regulatory, last mile connectivity, other issues stall the march towards FMC.
"For the traditional telcos, this era of convergence is associated with a plethora of challenges of financial, regulatory, operational and business model implications", says Ramdev Sharma, CTO huawei Technologies. In order to overcome these challenges and to retain their prominent top position in the value chain the telcos need to transform.
However the transformation seems to be big ask for servive providers as face number of un ironed regulatory and infrastructure issues coming in the way of fixed mobile convergence.
"India has a severe regulatory problems today as to how services and networks need to be defined. In many ways VoIP is a pre-requisite for the present generation FMC technology", says Jahangir Raina, Co-author of report on "The Impact of FMC on World Telecommunications Markets" published by market research firm iLocus.
"FMC will penetrate in the environments where VoIP is already present", adds Jahangir
But regularatory authorities are not sure what to do with VoIP. The word convergence if it involves VoIP will become unacceptable to them. The IP telephony Act is still at loss to define whether the termination of Circuit and Packet base networks can be done on the same machine. Add to that is the unusual demands being put on ISP’s to dole out surcharge if they wan t to deploy VoIP.
This will impact the proliferation of VoIP and ultimately FMC. Also the regulatory regime is still to come out with a concrete 3G policy which is of paramount importance to FMC adoption the country
Much bigger issue coming the in the way of FMC is the need for high-speed broadband network. "The number of bhigh sped broadband lines hovers around few millions and with that number, roll out of FMC is unthinkable. There is low fixed teledensity and prices of mobile are relatively low compared to fixed (Hong Kong in the only other country where there is not a significant price difference between mobile and fixed calls", says Amrish Kacker, Head Wireless & Multimedia, Asia, Analysys Consulting,.
"As a result, the traditional FMC approach is unlikely to succeed. FMC in India is likely to be driven when alternate access infrastructure networks are deployed - e.g. WiMAX. When that happens, while the network will be primarily deployed for internet access, it could support WiMAX based handsets as well" adds Amrish.
Added to the fact is that in India, the data ARPU is miserably low and mobile Internet penetration is in single digit thousands. WiFi is scarce. All these factors mean that FMC in the residential segment will take several years in India to take hold.
Positive intentions cause for optimism
The recent announcements about delivering broadband free across country augurs well for FMC industry Also, this year being announced as the Year of Broadband we shall witness significant growth in broadband user base as well which is very essential to catalyze the service providers to look at FMC offerings.
The FMC market is still at a nascent stage and if clear positive regulatory policy is on the anvil, aided by improving broadband access, FMC is likely to gain momentum in the near future.
Increased number of partnerships and collaboration between traditionally separated fixed and mobile operators are observed.
"Indian operators are starting to wake up to the benefits of wireless broadband by not only supporting deployments of Wi-Fi as well as interoperability testing labs for convergence equipment, they are also looking at access methods such as WiMAX", says .
Just as important, Indian Operators are engaging into closer collaboration with the wider industry. All the major Service Providers have a presence in wireline and mobile services. It is just a matter of time when subscribers start demanding consistent service and experience a cross the telecom networks
"Moreover, cellular tariffs have fallen considerably over past few years and now equal fixed-line tariffs. Quality of mobile services within dense areas such as office buildings have gone down considerably since more and more people use mobile phones for even intra-office calling. This will force the service providers to seriously considers FMC as an option", says A Sethuraman, Chief Marketing Officer, South Asia, Alcatel-Lucent.
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