After reading the historical studies of telecom in the United State, my grad student said don’t pay too much attention to interconnection. The standard answer, what are the three priorities of regulation -interconnection, interconnection and interconnection.
Now, later, I have to kind of say Divakar was right. This is such a radical statement that the guy from the FCC is cringing here. My example is Bangladesh. My friend Abu Saeed Khan used to complain, we don’t have telecom service in Bangladesh, we have intercom service in Bangladesh. Now we have 98% of the population covered. They’re covering not only the population of Bangladesh, they’re covering India.
The critical success factor was not interconnection, it was spectrum and licenses. Licenses given cleanly would be nice, but dirty licenses would be OK. In Sri Lanka we have a concept of productive corruption and dirty corruption. We go back to that original lesson, devise policy and regulatory solutions that are appropriate for the institutional environment (including the prevalent, dominant business model). It is very important that regulators understand the business model used by their companies.
Let’s take mobile number portability. Take Pakistan. They had MNP, yet people still had multiple SIMs. They are on three friends and family plans with three networks. You are in the friends and family plan of this guy and you call the first number, says not on network, you call till you get a number and give a missed call. Then you wait, either he will call you back, or you wait for him change the SIMs (to the first number, where you are friends and family).
This is what is done on a routine basis at the bottom of the pyramid. I’m not saying MNP is bad, but in terms of priority there are many other things we should be doing. In this forthcoming report I say let us derive regulatory practices from business models rather than the abstract.
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Rohan Samarajiva
It is not a forthcoming report, but a completed one: http://www.oecd.org/dataoecd/43/30/43603296.pdf