Chief executives of several international telecom companies have opined that technology has made redundant the need for insisting on competition in the last-mile segment of a fixed-line telecom network.

Taking part in a discussion on the outlook for the telecom sector here today, the industry leaders said cellular mobile and wireless-in-local-loop operators were now in competition with the fixed-line operators.

Hence, technology has ensured that the regulator need not insist on competition at the last-mile stage for the fixed-line operator.

All participants agreed that telecom operators must keep a healthy business to ensure a steady growth of the sector.

The lessons from how excessive competition in the airline business eventually harmed consumers must be learnt by the telecom regulators while laying down the rules, they said.

Participants at the session included David W.  Dorman, chairman and CEO AT&T Company, Volker Jung, member of the corporate executive board of Siemens, Keiji Tachikawa, president and CEO of NTT DoCoMo of Japan, and Edward S Tian, president and CEO of China Netcom Corporation.

The discussion veered round to the regulator and the insistence on payment of licence fees by the operators.

Dorman regretted that rules for the players often changed mid-stream and a 33-page piece of legislation in the US had been expanded to a 700-page rulebook to interpret the law.

Tachikawa pointed out that Japan had no system of upfront licence fee payment. There was revenue sharing and his company had shared $200 million of revenue with the Japanese government last year.

Tachikawa said the third generation mobile equipment would open up new opportunities of multi-media communication, although the battery life of these instruments needed to be improved.

Future opportunities lay in video-mail, video-conferencing and e-commerce through such mobile instruments.

Telecom operators should also explore possibilities of offering content and e-commerce on a commission basis, he said.

Endorsing such a model, Jung said the only viable business model in telecom was to offer excellent services and make consumers pay for them. There was no way services cost could be recovered through advertising.

He also underlined the importance of investing in telecom infrastructure, without which no business model could yield results. Last year, investment in telecom infrastructure declined by 20 per cent and this was not a healthy trend, he said.

Tian said the big opportunity was in creating the broadband, on which depended the success of new generation instruments and services.

Just as airlines made money from the first class and business class passengers, telecom companies should tap the broadband for revenue.

Consumers would be willing to pay for higher speed, just as new computers with faster processing speed carried a premium in the market, he said.