New Telecom startups in Bangalore

Dr. V. Sridhar is a Research Fellow at Sasken Communication Technologies, Bangalore, India, wherein he looks after emerging technology areas, idea incubation, knowledge management and government/academia relationships. His latest book titled The Telecom Revolution in India: Technology, Regulation and Policy has been published by the Oxford University Press India (see book review). Dr. Sridhar has taught at many Institutions in the US, New Zealand and India. He has been a member of government committees in telecom and IT. He is the co-editor of International Journal of Business Data Communications and Networking. Dr. Sridhar has a Ph.D. from the University of Iowa. His work on telecom can be found online at vsridhar.info. Dr. Sridhar joins us in this exclusive interview with YourStory, covering the impact ofIndia’s policies on startups and innovation.

How favorable are policies in India for telecom/IT startups?

In general, setting up telecom/ IT companies for which no government licensing is required has been quite liberal inIndia. However, there is no seed fund for R&D startups in India. As an example, in countries such as Finland, there is a government set-up for venture funding of start-ups including space in tech parks. Though some of the academic institutes such as IIM-B have been nurturing startups in their entrepreneurship centres, the cases are few and far between.

Telecom policies and stipulations on issues such as SMS quotas and bans may come in the way of startups and other companies in the mobile marketing domain. How can such roadblocks be overcome?

I think we made breakthrough in the implementation of Telecom Commercial Communications Customer Preference (TCCP) Regulation. The National Do Not Call Registry is transparent and is a breakthrough in protecting customers’ individual preferences. The TCCP regulation is not applicable for transactional messages and hence does not affect entities that provide them. It is stringent on promotional messages. However, as we move towards wireless broadband, the firms should focus more their non-intrusive m-advertising targeted at smartphone users.

Telecom policy bottlenecks have slowed down the growth of 3G, Internet telephony, etc. How is this affecting Indian startups in this space?

Though limited amount of spectrum (2 × 5 MHz) has been assigned to the 3G operators, the services have not yet picked up in full scale due to less adoption. One possible explanation could be the lack of compelling 3G applications. However, recently the operators are seeing more traffic on their 3G networks. Compelling India sensitive (much like the hit Ring Back Tones) applications is the key for success of 3G adoption in India. Niche areas such as m-education and m-healthcare are areas the Indian start-ups need to focus, now that smartphone usage in India is showing almost exponential growth.