Distinctions between fixed and mobile telecoms blurring: Tsang

Updated at 7.18pm: Telecommunications operators today could no longer choose whether they were in the fixed or mobile telecommunications business, Secretary for Commerce, Industry and Technology John Tsang Chun-wah said on Friday.

At a speech to the American Chamber of Commerce in Hong Kong, Mr Tsang said old distinctions between fixed and mobile communications were changing rapidly.

'They [operators] must be far more customer-centric in meeting their customers' communication needs, whether they are corporate clients or individual consumers,'' Mr Tsang said.

He said operators must also take advantage of the continued development in convergence technologies and standards. 'The demarcation between fixed and mobile telecommunications markets will blur. The structure of the telecommunications industry in the near future will be quite different from what it is today,'' he added.

Mr Tsang said that according to some industry predictions, the boundary between fixed and mobile technologies would largely be dissolved by around 2010.

'This will occur as incumbent operators migrate to all-Internet Protocol core networks, enabling them to share the same subsystems for supporting both fixed and mobile accesses.'