Build good cars; do not worry about the road

Experts at the V&D panel deliberate on how India should loosen its purse string to build adequate infrastructure for the new digital economy

- PRATIMA HARIGUNANI

What a time, what a year! The country is witnessing a negative growth rate – it is an unprecedented time. Digital is not an option anymore, but a lifeline of sorts. Highlighting this, Dr. Jaijit Bhattacharya, President, Centre for Digital Economy Policy said that the country needs a robust, unfailing and secure digital infrastructure.

“The government has to ensure connectivity across India, including rural areas and the industry has to consider some imperatives,” he said before asking the experts at the strategy session to suggest the best way to build infrastructure for Digital India. The panel discussion was part of the 20th edition Telecom Leadership Forum organised by Voice&Data.

“The country has had an interesting journey from networking 1.0 which was about fixed line and mobile connectivity. The 2.0 world was about content and data providers. This brought a revolution in the cloud space as well. This allowed us to build networks right from access to cloud. Now we are in 3.0 phase which is a platform economy.” explained Gautam Billa, Senior Director, Fields Systems Engineering, Ciena “Now it becomes extremely critical to drive everything in the entire economy. Cloud players have come in and have started to carve out a portion of the market. In the retail market also, the e-commerce market is growing. Again, new business models are emerging and driving this digital economy. These different facets are going to be driven by apps and will be fuelled by the cloud and connectedness platform. Hence the scale and reliability of these platforms becomes paramount.”