In an interview to PTI, GSMA Director General Vivek Badrinath said there has been a lot of simplification in telecom rules, but still it is heavily regulated, and there is room for further improvement.
"Trust and scams are a big area of concern. Nobody holds the answer alone. People use telecoms to scam people. People use social networks to attract them. People use banks to get paid. So it's important that the whole ecosystem comes together and, to a certain extent, that regulation is unified," Badrinath said.
He said if the regulator focuses on only one part of the ecosystem, it can't really solve the problem.
"It's an important problem for the population. So we need to address it," he said.
The Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI) has convened a Joint Committee of Regulators (JCoR) to address scams and cyber fraud, but sectoral regulators still govern the rules separately.
Badrinath said that both the government and regulators should be open to dialogue, simplifying rules further to enable growth of the industry.
"One of the areas where I think regulation should really play an enabling role is really on the opening of the features that can make 5G monetised. So be more outcome-focused rather than starting to write very detailed rules. Give a bit of trust to the industry also. We talked about trust. The operators have done their job with a very clear focus to improve the lives of the people in the country," he said.
Badrinath said the 5G monetisation has always been about using it also for business applications in factories, hospitals, remote care, for things that require innovative services.
He said that network slicing is one of the key features of 5G technology that can help telecom operators innovate and launch new services.
"It is important that the market is allowed and the operators are allowed to innovate, which means that they're allowed to roll out quality on demand. It doesn't mean that it's a two-tier or a low level of performance," Badrinath said.
He said quality of service has to remain very adequate for all, but it's also important to be able to do these boosted offers for business applications.
Recently, India has seen an industry-wide debate on network slicing, with a section of stakeholders seeing it as a technology to game net neutrality principles.
Badrinath said 5G technology brings an opportunity to do some level of tiering in the technology, as it happens in the case of trains where charges differ based on class of travel from third AC to first AC and in flights from economy to business class.
"You pay depending on what you want. What is important is indeed that the fundamental service gets delivered. No operator is saying we will only offer AI on upper tiers. That's not the point. The only thing is you get a guarantee, or let's say some level of comfort, that there is a real business demand for that," he said.
Badrinath said quality of service should be protected and operators held accountable, but those willing to pay more for better facilities should not be deprived of it.
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