Monday, June 04, 2007 Telecom exec urges promotion of ‘sufficient’ competition in RP
MANILA—The chairman of the Philippine Long Distance Telephone (PLDT) Co. has urged the government to support the telecommunications by “promoting sufficient but not ruinous competition.”
Speaking before more than 300 delegates from over 100 telecommunications carriers and entities from 32 nations during the 3rd Asian Carriers Conference (ACC) in Cebu, PLDT chairman Manuel Pangilinan said telecom firms are viewed now not just as businesses but as part of an important sector of the country’s economy.
“It is fair to say that our services have acquired an important social dimension, rather than being simply viewed as a business," Pangilinan said.
“We have seen the enormous value that our industry adds to the economy and the benefits-both direct and indirect-that are conferred on consumers,” he added.
The ACC, which was hosted by PLDT and Smart Communication, was conceived by the PLDT Group to create a venue for discussion of trends such as NGN (Next Generation Network) and VoIP (Voice over Internet Protocol), and the challenges and opportunities in the fast-paced telecommunications industry.
Not enough
The three-day ACC conference ended last week and discussed how they could further improve the delivery of service to their customer.
Claire Paponneau, executive vice president of the International Wholesale Solutions of the France Telecom Group, said having the technology is not enough.
“Customer experience, customer care, billing, marketing and having the right business model are also very important,” she told participants during the event.
Paponneau said the diversity of convergence offers limitless variety of contents and seamless fixed-mobile worlds and this will require flexibility, turnkey solutions, quick time-to-market and satisfactory quality.
Easily accessible
“Building a new world for our customers means fewer communications devices, simpler manner of communicating, more and easily accessible content, less pure voice and more innovative services,” said Paponneau.
Tesh Kapadia, senior director of Telarix, said telecom companies nowadays are in a “battle of the business models.”
He noted that networks are integrating the Internet and the Public Switched Telephone Network toward a more flexible, easy-to-innovate system with a more viable financial model, security and quality of service adding that this is the result of the NGN.
“We now have horizontally integrated services that include voice, video, content gaming, VPN (or virtual private network), ASP (or application service provider), etcetera,” said Kapadia.
“The battle now moves from one of network supremacy to the battle of business models,” he added. (MSN/Sunnex)
