Hyderabad: The experience of success of urban voice telephony should be used in other areas to kick-start growth.

Technologies are changing fast and a successful licensing regime should be such that technological changes do not impact such regimes, says former TRAI chairman Pradip Baijal.

He was delivering the second Dr. T.H. Chowdary endowment lecture on `India's information society, the regulatory dilemma' here on Wednesday on the occasion of the World Telecommunication Day.

India's information society arrived. The tele-density growth increased from 2 per cent from 1948 to 1998 to 3 per cent each year during the last three years. Mobile subscribers increased from 0.2 million per month during early 2003 to 5 million per month. Yet, there were huge gaps to be covered for Internet, broadband, TV and rural telephony. "This presents a dilemma for the regulator and policy maker," Mr. Baijal said.

He said technologists were back with a vengeance bringing in more viable technologies every year. This led to a situation where the regulators and the government ran behind technological changes to keep pace with them and to enable the networks to deliver these superior services to subscribers. The present technologies were likely to be taken over by more cost effective technologies in future.

More convergence

The trend showed that technologies were increasingly turning digital and thus bringing in more convergence in the networks for delivery of different services, Mr. Baijal said. Earlier, Justice D.S.R. Varma, Judge, A.P High Court, inaugurated the seminar on `Security in cyber space'. He expressed concern at the increased threat in cyber space and said law alone would not be able to check the menace. Manufacturers need to build more secure computers to instil confidence among users.

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