Our notes from the TRAI seminar on the regulatory environment around OTT’s, essentially, regulation of Internet services in India, on Mobile. For context, read this and this. Please pardon the typos. Some parts of the talk have been paraphrased, and some points missed. Venky Nishtala, CTO, Rediff.com: "There is no Internet in the country. Only ISPs. The original ISP was AOL, and it had to change with times. In 2000, we had networks that were charging content providers, and when I was running mail services, I had to pay both ways. Internet businesses in India, today, are not viable. The bandwidth costs are the highest in the world. You only speak about how to protect Telcos from intenrational content. Mr TV Ramachandran (from Vodafone) talked about Google's deal with France Telecom. A Facebook will not come out of India. Telcos have to learn how to handle that. We have weak infra, and there is no QoS on delivery of data on mobile Internet or SMS. Bank payment confirmations are delivered the next day. Landlines are going away, and wireless is the future. Public infrastructure and right of way is grossly underutilized and wireless infra is over-stressed. We have PSU's in every locality, with Right of Way. One of the reasons why broadband Internet wasn't taken up by telcos was because of the cost. The cost of laying a Km of fibre in Bombay or Delhi is Rs 45-80 lakhs. Our broadband plan is limited to gram panchayats. They don't dare to touch urban areas. Net neutrality…
