<$BlogRSDUrl$>

Wednesday, August 27, 2003

The policy and regulatory implications of wireless overtaking wireline 

I had briefly in the previous post touched upon the shift in the big metropolitan cities in India where wireless subscribers are fast overtaking wireline subscribers. While this phenomenon is new in India, several countries like Cambodia and Uganda have situations where wireless subscribers are almost 70% of overall telecom subscribers (it is true that the base of landlines was very low to start with). Of course, there are serious policy and regulatory implications to this development, including whether the telcos in developing countries should just hang up on expensive wireline telephony and fully embrace wireless instead.

In this paper, a good friend of mine, Valerie Feldmann, Telecoms policy consultant at the ITU, analyses some of the issues.