Question 1: As the head of TK can you please convey us your thoughts in general about developments in Turkish Telecom sector and in the World at the beginning of 2007?
Dr.Tayfun Acarer: Very rapid developments are happening in telecommunications technologies in the world and these developments are shaping up the telecommunications regulating regimes of countries and thus important gains are acquired in communal aspect. With these developments, the telecommunications sector has gained a strategic importance in our country like in the world; their abilities to manufacture according to services and understructure have become an indicator of those countries level of development.
Important steps in telecommunications field are also taken in our country especially in the recent years. In the phase of improving policies in telecommunications sector, developments taking place in the world are closely followed and mutual strategic goals with developed countries are attempted to be adopted. The increase in Turkeys competition capability is due to watching the technology closely and building the telecommunications sector on sound grounds.
When technological developments are examined the most important matter to attract our attention is that new services that are to be offered are in need of high speed connection at an increasing rate. A second aspect which is noted is that the users want to reach services from wherever they are in other words independent of the location. When looked at services requiring high speed connection, we can say that they are in a convergence comprising of sound, image and content. In short, needs and offered services are congregated around the principles of high speed connection, mobility and convergence and technology is developing in this way.
On the other hand demand in multi media applications such as image has dislocated telecommunications from voice pivot to data pivot. This drift has given birth to the concept of a new network which operates and carries without differentiating between sound, image and data traffic. This concept defined as New Generation Network (NGN) is really the conveyance of sound, image and data traffic through a package based mutual backbone.
Traditionally, both technologies related to telecommunications and Internet and publishing have been handled both with their technical dimension and also with their composition dimension independently. Since services that are in need of wide band such as voice communications, radio and television are able to be offered over IP based Internet, developments in wired and wireless wideband have started to gradually abolish this independence. This situation is also rapidly changing the regulations in telecommunications market. Many companies are able to offer communications and publishing services to the end user over the Internet. Thus various services are started to be offered over NGN.
It is possible that IPv6 also described as New Generation Internet that will replace IPv4 which is broadly used at the moment, will stop being a scarce source for security, increasing demands for new services such as mobility and service quality and IP address capacity.
With the aim of solving transportation problems in fields such as traffic problem being first, highway transportation , road safety in transportation, efficiency in transportation and environmental quality and in order to form a more effective, efficient, economic and safe transportation understructure it is expected that the usage of Telematic systems will become widespread and along these with the transition to Telematic applications it will be possible to decrease the number of stolen vehicles and traffic accidents.
You will read about TKs Business plan for 2007 in the sequence tomorrow : 2007 Will be The Year for Wideband Services Variety