Moneycontrol Podcast - SOTD - Skype from the sky & other telecom stories

Moneycontrol News

In the not-so-distant future, one would be able to use your mobile for calling and browsing the Internet mid-air through a flight. Passengers would also be able to use apps like WhatsApp and Skype to make calls on landlines. These two were among the several key recommendations of the regulator that the Telecom Commission today gave its approval to with some changes.

The Department of Telecommunications released a telecom policy which aims to create a roadmap for nascent techonologies such as Aritficial Intelligence, cloud computing, robotics, the internet of things, and other methods of communication.

The National Communications policy. Department draft aims to create 4 million, foregin investment USD 100 billion by 2022.

The government is targeting "50 Mbps broadband for all by 2022" with an aim to increase the share of digital communications sector to the country’s GDP to 8 percent by that year from 6 percent now.

It also aims to provide universal broadband coverage at 50 Mbps to every citizen, a daunting task in a country where data speeds are mostly one-tenth of that. It also aims to establish 5 million public WiFi hotspots by 2020 and 10 million by 2022. In many cases, the targets have been set with two deadlines -- 2020 and 2022.

Tune in to the Moneycontrol podcast to know all the details of this ambitious draft telecom policy.