At the inaugural session at IAMAI conference on Mobile content and services, some of the questions the session tried to contemplate answers to are:
- With the 3G spectrum auctions just around the corner, will there be massive push towards data and services as opposed to voice?
- What is going to be regulatory environment?
- Are MVAS players ready?
- What is the rural game-plan post 3G?
- Will we see a balance between voice and data?
T V Ramachandran, Secretary General, COAI delivered the Theme address at the session, Ramachandran opened with a quote of Shashi Tharoor on the subject,
The transformation in telecom has accomplished what our socialist policies couldn’t, empowering the less fortunate.
He later, clarified the impact of Telecom in Economic growth, quoting the research by Indian Council For Research on International Economic Relations (ICRIER), he said
- Indian states with higher mobile penetration are expected to grow faster, approximately 1.2% points for every 10% growth in mobile penetration.
- SME’s gain more benefit.
- In Under served areas, mobiles can help lower transaction costs and substitute for physical transport.
- Level playing field for player’s in different technologies.
Ramachandran stated that 3G will stimulate Economic activity across the sectors due to multiplier effect. He also raised some questions on the spectrum policy on the need to have a clear and comprehensive spectrum policy.
He questioned if we were really technology neutral, quoting that the reserve price for 20MHz band of WiMax spectrum is set at Rs 1,750 crores while 5MHz of 3G spectrum is set at Rs 3500 crores, priced at 8 times the WiMax, he said there’s a huge disparity between technologies and there’s a requirement for a Level playing field for players in different technologies.
Indic SMS: An efficient encoding scheme
Nadeem Akhtar, Senior Research Engineer from the Centre of Excellence in Wireless Technology (CEWiT) gave a presentation on “Efficient encoding schemes for SMS in Indian Languages”.
In the presentation, Nadeem pointed out that increased adoption of mobile phones in rural India is surely going to increase the demand for SMS in Indian languages, he argued that Indian language scripts are very complex and the current SMS standards are based on unicode which requires more bits per character to encode (2 bytes/character) which is quite inefficient compared to an english SMS.
CEWiT proposed a unique encoding scheme in the presentation, which is a 7-bit encoding scheme allowing 155 characters in an Indic SMS. Nadeem also said that this has already been implemented for 10 major Indian scripts, viz., Bengali, Gujarati, Hindi, Kannada, Malayalam, Oriya, Punjabi, Tamil, Telugu and Urdu.
He pointed out that there are challenges in the adoption of encoding, as keypad layouts vary from device to device and to implement the encoding CEWiT needs ODM support. The greater challenge with Indic SMS is with the Mobile phones already in the market.
