Belarusian telecoms to discuss cooperation with Skype, Viber in Q2 2015

Cooperation between Belarusian telecommunication companies and over-the-top (OOT) service providers (Skype, Viber and other ones) is supposed to be discussed in Q2 2015 during a regular session of the public advisory board (expert council) for entrepreneurship development under the Belarusian Information Technologies and Communications Ministry, representatives of the Ministry told BelTA.

Held on 25 February, the session of the public advisory board gathered a large number of representatives of concerned agencies. The session focused on monetizing individual services provided using telecommunication networks. The international community has so far failed to come up with a universal mechanism to regulate these matters although regulations and interoperator agreements used in different countries are similar to a large extent. Participants of the session of the public advisory board for entrepreneurship development exchanged opinions concerning the development of common approaches and an optimal position for regulating these matters in Belarus taking into account international experience.

The volume of traffic transferred by telecommunication networks in developed countries has been rapidly rising recently. The fact prompts regular investments on the part of telecom operators in the development and modernization of the infrastructure taking into account needs of other market participants in addition to proprietary needs. The additional traffic is primarily “heavy” multimedia traffic, which is sensitive to the quality and throughput capacity of telecommunication networks.

For the sake of preserving a high pace of development of information and communication technologies it is necessary to find a compromise and reach a balance of interests between telecommunication operators that spend increasingly large amounts of money on operating and developing their engineering infrastructure and third-party service providers that use the networking capacity of the former to deliver content to end users, noted representatives of the Belarusian Information Technologies and Communications Ministry.

Taking part in the session of the public advisory board for entrepreneurship development were representatives of the Industry, Fuel and Energy Complex, Transport and Communications Commission of the House of Representatives of the National Assembly of Belarus, representatives of telecommunication companies, heads of public associations and associations representing interests of a large number of participants of the national market of information and communication technologies. The latter included the Association of Information Technology Companies, the research and technology association Infopark, and the Telecommunications Industry Union.