Infrastructure in the telecom business

When one looks at any infrastructure in the country, mostly it is owned by the government or there are just two infrastructure providers...We can take innumerable examples and we will find this case everywhere...

For example, lets take the example of road infrastructure...In most of the countries this will be owned by the government and different transport providers will use this infrastructure to provide services paying road tax to the government and charging customers for the transport services....Every transport provider will have the same roads to use but they differentiate themselves by the type of carrier, type of services and quality of services....But there is no duplication of infrastructure and wastage of resources...

And we can find similar kind of examples in rail infrastructure, electricity infrastructure, water infrastructure and even in air infrastructure...In most of the developing nations we have government owning this infrastructure and in most of the developed nations we will see maximum duopoly...This kind of arrangement helps the nation use the infrastructure in best possible fashion. It also helps the nation in getting to invest in right services and no undue investment in resources which are not required...

After mentioning all these examples one wonders why governments around the world havent adopted the same approach for telecom infrastructure...Over the time, I think if we look at different markets, I am sure even the telecom infrastructure will evolve into duopoly but it has taken far too long for it to evolve itself into it...The question is why didn't the governments around the world look at different examples and took this approach from day one...This would have helped customers getting better services and even much better competition because every services provider would have used the same infrastructure...Specifically for India's case, this approach could have resolved this whole spectrum issue itself. The biggest bottleneck for indian telecom infrastructure development...

We do see this starting to happen everywhere...All the major companies around the world have already started developing infrastructure in partnership...For example recently Vodafone partnered with Telefonica to develop 3G infrastructure together everywhere in the world...Similary we will soon see similar kind of parterships developing everywhere...These kinds parternships help the company spread the cost base and use the money judiciously...We all know money is getting costly and even difficult to come by...These measures will only help our cause not only these difficult times but help us use our resources most effectively even in good times.

I know this is more of infrastructure sharing rather than the above point I was making. But I think this is a more realistic solution in todays world and I will talk more about it in my next blog.