At VAS Asia last week, Rajat Mukarji, Head of Corporate Affairs for Idea Cellular, appeared to suggest that it is unlikely that Indian telecom operators will follow the path that their peers in the US have, of pushing for unlimited data usage. Mukarji mentioned that the iPhone and its huge, unprecedented usage for data and applications broke the back of networks like AT&T, and in return hardly earned anything from it. They have to restructure their networks in order to accommodate the demand for data. It's likely that Indian operators will choose not to play the role of a dumb pipe. At the same time, earlier in his talk, Mukarji mentioned two other issues that telecom operators in India are likely to face in the future: - How are telecom operators going to communicate their basket of services to an end user? The future is huge, but the complexities will be more. - How are telecom operators going to price these products? Our take: Standardize The two situations are interrelated - because telecom operators don't want to just play a pipe, want control over the services that are launched on their network, they have to fix prices and develop promotional plans for services. Obviously, with the spray-and-pray model in operation, with thousands of services being tried out across circles, this is incredibly complex. As Viren Popli, then SVP (Mobile) for STAR India said a few years ago, telecom operators are like a toll gate that is determining a revenue share…
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