Federation of Indian Chambers of Commerce and Industry (FICCI), in association with Department of Telecommunications (DoT), Government of India recently organized the second in series of India Telecom event. Dr Manmohan Singh, PM, Government of India inaugurated the ‘India Telecom 2007- Digital Divide to Digital Opportunities’ in the capital. The four-day event was held from
Dec 12-15, 2007 at Pragati Maidan, New Delhi.
The event focused hugely on wireless broadband connectivity technology—WiMax, and was well received by the industry majors like BSNL, Ericsson, Nokia Siemens Networks and Qualcomm, showcasing their product offerings for the country.
"India Telecom 2006 was also a success, which brought confidence in us to announce the second edition of ‘India Telecom 2007’," said Rishi Arora, Research Associate Trade Fairs, FICCI.
This year the prime focus was on three things—WiMax Forum, China and Taiwan booths. India is emerging as a telecom-manufacturing hub. Major players like Nokia, Ericsson, Motorola, Flextronics, etc have their manufacturing set-up present but this event further focused on showcasing the huge potential that India holds in the telecom sector for inviting investments in telecom equipment manufacturing.
The objective of the exhibition- cum-conference was to discuss new growth drivers that are revolutioniz-ing the telecom sector in India and around the world and assess challenges and opportunities associated with new technologies and growth frontiers. More than 200 million subscribers are already connected, and 2007 is reckoned as the ‘year of broadband’. Taking this further, focus on broadband and rural telephony to cover maximum geographical reach was given. If Qualcomm talked about ultra mobile broadband (UMB) and ‘Rev B,’ then at the Tata Indicom booth, we had the demonstration of applications like ‘Rev B’ and ‘fork to farm’.
Arora further stated, "The basic idea of organizing this event is to bring the government and the telecom players under the same umbrella to explore the opportunities. It is the platform for interactive sessions between government, policy makers, industrial leaders and potential investors. What better place then the capital city, which is the hub of all the major government officials and the head offices of the corporates."
Now the organizers are looking forward to churn out more response in terms of participations and fruitful business propositions in the next year’s event.