Last week we attended the China VoIP + Next Gen Service Conference and Expo here in Beijing. Here are a few notes from the event.
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As usual, the first speaker was a government guest--this time it was Yu Xiaohui from the MII. He talked about the global growth of VoIP, noting that in March 2008, people spent 100 billion minutes making phone calls on Skype. He also said that according to MII data, most of VoIP users in China are adults--a significantly older user group than in North America and Europe, both of which have younger users on average.
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The next speaker was from James Yang from UTStarcom, which grew to prominence supplying much of China's PHS/Xiaolingtong equipment and handsets and is not trying to shift its focus to newer technologies, including VoIP. He discussed the "Telecom 2.0" buzzword and how VoIP fits in. Overall, he described a fairly rosy future for operators and the telecom sector in general.
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The most popular speaker of the day was Kan Kaili, a well-known professor at Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications (BUPT). Professor Kan has a long reputation of publicly and loudly voicing his opinions on telecommunications development in China. Many of his arguments took opposite positions from the previous speakers. Notably, he said he hoped that all the telecom and mobile operators would go bankrupt, and that such an event would "set the industry free" and lead to period of great growth and development.
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Here are a few more highlights from Prof. Kan's speech [I quote from memory here]:
There is little difference between telecom operators and thieves...Operators should be like workers building a road--they should build it and then get out of the way. They shouldn't be able to endlessly charge citizens who only want to walk down the road...The government should not protect operators who engage in this kind of behavior. Doing so will only hinder the development of China's telecom sector...
Ideally, in the future, all the operators' networks will be interconnected, controlled by the government, and free of charge to the citizens....
[Spoken in English, for emphasis!] The Internet should of the people, by the people, and for the people...No company should be able to monopolize it.
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