Resumo de Unified Licening That Helps Ict Convergence (1)

Licensing must necessarily be a continuously evolving process. It has been argued that if left unchanged a licensing policy may become an obstacle to the development of an ICT market. Preserving onerous and complicated licensing requirements creates artificial barriers to market entry and hinder competition.

Licensing has started transiting from the era of granting individual licences for all conceivable undertakings to the issuance of class licences and general authorizations. Individual licences are now mostly limited to those seeking scarce resources or deploying networks on a significant scale.

As regulatory frameworks become better established, regulatory authorities are more willing to reduce regulatory intervention at the point of market entry. In the traditional licensing classification, a license is based on the type of service, facility or technology provided. However the exponential and continual advancement in technology has almost rendered this classification irrelevant. Additionally the phenomenon of convergence is placing increasing strain on such traditional licensing practices. Some of the licensing options that have been introduced and have become prevalent in recent times include; General authorization, class license, unified or converged license, facilities and service based licences, etc.

Historically, different networks were used to deliver voice, video and data and end users use different equipment to receive these services, however technological developments have radically changed this scenario and have also bred a multiplicity of ICT services and applications. A converged licensing is a tool allowing competing operators and service providers to rapidly deploy new services to meet market demand without having to seek new licences.

New technologies such as VOIP, Wi-fi, Wimax etc have gradually blurred the distinction between services. In jurisdiction where such new technologies have been banned or discouraged in one way or another, Regulators in those domains have found that such regulatory action was myopic in the long run and did not stop the usage of the technology but rather encouraged the users to go underground. Regulators are now opting for a more liberal approach to these issues and are discovering that in a converging world it is dangerous to adopt an ostrich position.

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