Digital India by CII

Digital India www.telecomlive.com the Digital India initiative because as we look at Digital India, the fundamental aspect is the backbone which lifts the Digital India on its shoulders which constitute telecom networks and related infrastructure. Digital revolution cannot move forward without this backbone being enhanced and continuing to be maintained as the state of theartinfrastructure. We talk about 3G, 4G and 5G. We always talk about the great things that we do. We should also focus on some of the challenges. How many people can take calls for at least 10 mins without any distortion or being dropped? I am sure everyone is working on enhancing this infrastructure but there is an urgent need to put our all energies into it and look at what can we do to basically enhance the quality of thisinfrastructure. One big thing that I call would call is digital resilience, it is otherwise called cyber resiliency and that is going to be significantlyimportant.Everythingthatwedointheareaof digital would eventually depend on resiliency of this infrastructure. If the infrastructure goes down then the trust between the digital provider and end-consumer gets lost. So every time consumer goes into web to access any information, he has to have absolute trust in terms of essentially accessing the same information and he should be able to have the kind of user experience that he would haveotherwise. Govt is taking all possible steps that can give flip to the telecom market Rakesh Garg, Ministry of Communications & IT Today we have more than 1 bn telecom subscribers in India. We have the second largest telecom subscribers in the world and got more than 300 mn internet subscribers. Teledensity in the urban area is almost going to touch 150 pc and in rural area it is approximately 49 pc. We have weaker areas like broadband connectivity, however, last year we have added more than 40 mn people. Now, we have reached almost 109 mn people who have broadband connectivity whether it's through landline, fibre or wire- less. But still, if we see it in terms population of more than 1.25bnpeople,thisseemsverylow. World is changing and the way most of the things are going online with internet as backbone. Most of our activities like banking, e-commerce and health are now getting transferred to the internet. All these require very resilient backbone in terms of internet connectivity. Today, internet has become importantwithaverystrongtelecombackbone. Government is committed to take all possible steps that can give flip to the telecom market. We must ensure a robust backbone of telecom in the country. We have to ensure a vibrant market in which there is competition with best possible people throughout in the world. Whenever people think of manufacturing, software development, R&D or anything related to telecom in the world, they must think India for doing these activities. India already is a big market. Government has taken many steps in last one year. One of the major steps was in spectrum sharing and trading. Another major initiative in this direction is the declaration of defence band. Now, the harmoniza- tion process is going on and by year-end, we will be able to release lot of spectrum on one side and on the other side spectrum efficiency will increase multi-folds. We have taken the decision on MNP whichmeansonecountryonenumber. Internet backbone is important. Optical Fibre must be very resilient or whatever backbone you choose must be resilient. Government has taken various steps like NOFN earlier, which has been renamed as BharatNet. It has not only been 14TelecomLIVE October 2015 Shree Parthasarathy Senior Director Deloitte Rakesh Garg Secretary DoT Pramod Saxena Chairman & MD Oxigen Services India Arvind Bali Director & CEO Videocon Telecommunications Ltd

Digital India by CII

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