Voice&Data's 16th Telecom Leadership Forum on 21st Dec in Delhi

NEW DELHI: The 16th edition of Telecom Leadership Conference & Awards, organised by Voice&Data magazine is going to be held on 21st December 2016 in New Delhi. This years' theme is 'The Transformation Imperative' and will focus on the key steps operators must take in 2017 to transform into digital operators.

The full day conference will have telecom luminaries speaking on a range of issues such as business, technology, regulatory and policy, quality of service, emerging businesses, and changing user profile and expectations across the entire length and breadth of telecom including mobile, fixed line, broadband, and VSATs. While telecom technologies, services and industry continue to rapidly evolve, that telecom is playing a growing role in the socio-economic development of our economy is a fact that is being accepted increasingly across all sections including the government and the consumers. Beyond voice and SMS, consumers are choosing service providers on plans and quality of data, video, services, internet. Operators are opening up their networks to empower and delight the customers. They are positioning themselves as digital lifestyle companies instead communication service providers.

Digital delivery of information and services has been proving to be a game changer in 2016. A telco that promises to deliver revolutionary service quality, speed, applications, and flexibility has lead to speedy 4G roll outs by all the major players; and driving significant consolidation in the ecosystem. Most telcos have little choice but to speed up evolution into digital service providers. They need to transform and mutate into new beings to survive and flourish. Transformation seems to be the only alternative. At the Voice&Data annual Telecom Leadership Forum the industry leadership will deliberate and brainstorm all that is required to drive this transformation. How all stakeholders can contribute in pushing the Digital India agenda and ensure that their interests are also addressed? How the promise of data explosion and IoT can be monetized? How best can the networks cope? How the cost of acquiring and retaining customers is to be best managed? What’s really holding broadband in the country? Where all collaboration can win? What more can the regulatory/ government can do at the policy level? … In brief, all that matters to the telcos in India will be discussed.

There are 6 main sessions in the conference besides the awards function. Inaugural session 'Digital Aspirations of a Billion People" will cover how telecom user profile and expectations are changing, and what is the government going to do to support telecom growth in India. The Broadband session is 'The Digital Service Provider', that will focus on how the digital service consumption patterns are changing in India, and what can a futuristic telco do to monetise these opportunities? The CTO Session is 'Aligning Braoadband With Digital India Vision' where key broadband stakeholders discuss the challenges and opportunities in transforming Digital India. In the fourth session session 'Technology as a Differentiator', speakers will identify the key technologies that will help transform telco networks to be realtime, on-demand, all on-line, safe, easy to use, and social. The CEO Session, 'The Digital Service Provider' will revolve around how the digital service consumption patterns are changing in India and what can a futuristic telco do to monetise these ? The next session 'The Next 12 Months' will see industry captains talking about the main action points in the coming days. These sessions will be followed by Voice&Data Awards 2017, where the Jury Awards and telecom business leadership awards will be presented.

Some of the key speakers at the last years edition were RS Sharma, chairman, TRAI; Himanshu Kapania, MD Idea Cellular; Anupam Srivastava, CMD, BSNL; Vinod Sawhny, CEO, RCom; Sergey Savchenko, CEO, MTS India; Arvind Bali, CEO, Videocon Telecom; Abhay Savargaonkar, CTO, Airtel; NK Gupta, directot, BSNL; Vishant Vora, CTO, Vodafone; Sameer Dave, CTO, Aircel; Rajan Mathews, DG, COAI; Ashok Sud, Secy General, AUSPI; Rajesh Chharia, president, ISPAI; TV Ramachandran, president, Broadband India Forum; Lt Gen SP Kochhar, CEO, Telecom Sector Skill Council; Sanjay Kaul, MD, Cisco India; Akhil Gupta, chairperson, TAIPA; Krish Sridhar, COO, Tikona Networks; Vipen Malhotra, CEO Arya Telecom; Partho Banerjee, MD, Hughes Communications; Pramod Saxena, MD, Oxigen); Vijay Shekhar Sharma, founder, PayTM; Romal Shetty, Telecom Head, KPMG; Arpita Pal Agarwal, Telecom Head, EY; and Sudhir Narang, MD, British Telecom. This year again, a similar galaxy of industry stalwarts are likely to participate.