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#MWC2013: Airtel’s Manoj Kohli Says Telco’s And OTT Players Need To Work Together, But Commercial Negotiations Are Important

At the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, the focus appears to be on the battle between OTT players (rather, Internet companies providing services to customers over telecom networks) and telecom operators, and the former continues to provide services, at times to the detriment of telecom operators. Manoj Kohli, CEO International and Joint MD at Bharti Airtel, when asked what he thinks about their relationship with OTT players, said that telecom operators and OTT Players "need to work together, and learn to live together. I believe we (telecom operators) can lift the level of usage of all these services, and customers propensity to use more and more, rather than continue this unnecessary tension. Of course, there are commercial negotiations that are important, and we do commercial negotiations all the time." At all the carrier centric sessions at the Mobile World Congress, the worry for telcos has been the impact of services like Whatsapp, Viber and VoIP, which are being provided free of cost to customers, or at a fraction of the cost of telco services; telecom operators are calling for these services to be regulated and/or made to pay telcos for being made available to customers, essentially going against the principles of net neutrality. Airtel has consistently said that services like Google, Facebook and Twitter need to be charged for being provisioned to customers. Excerpts from our interview with Kohli's colleage K. Srinivas (more here ) MediaNama: So when it comes do data consumption, where do you stand on charging sites like Google for letting…

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Written By

Founder @ MediaNama. TED Fellow. Asia21 Fellow @ Asia Society. Co-founder SaveTheInternet.in and Internet Freedom Foundation. Advisory board @ CyberBRICS

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