The VNO Arrives

Could this new breed help stabilise the turbulent telecom in India?

VNOs are now a reality in India. Aerovoyce is the country’s first MVNO that has started its operations from Tamil Nadu. One would wonder why would VNOs be an interesting development about India where we are already seeing consolidation taking place and the remaining bleeding money. So, how VNOs would not add to the worries?

- Faisal Kawoosa

Looking at the present scenario, VNOs could potentially be one of the best ways of ‘rescuing’ the present affairs of telecom India. Some of the main issues that the telecom sector is facing include:- Transitioning from a voice centric to data oriented services.

- Balancing the resources between continuity of existing services and building for the next generation of services.

- Restructuring of the industry after M&As and emergence of a new ‘strong’ credentials player.

- Reduced time to monetize return on investments moving along the evolutionary generations of mobile technologies.

- Legacy infrastructure versus deployment of next generation infrastructure.

- Meeting rising expectations of consumers – individual as well as enterprise.

- Monetising innovative use cases arising out of IoT, analytics, cloud and other such technologies.

- Under-utilization of capacities in case of public sector telcos.

- Reducing the digital divide and having a focus around improving the rural telephony.

- Lack of skills within telcos to respond to changing opportunities. These issues, though do not encompass all the major issues faced by the Indian telecom, but list out some of the common challenges that the operators are facing across. VNOs can pitch in exactly filling the gaps to get rid of several of these challenges. For this, let’s have a look at what VNOs could potentially bring to the service scape: