Arun Bhikshesvaran, Radisys (00:06):
Okay, good afternoon. Thank you everyone for coming. Great to have some very distinguished guests here We are at the Radius booth in Mobile World Congress 2025 on a very pertinent topic about how to work with breakthrough ideas in markets that represent high growth and hypertension. Right? So great to have everybody here on the panel with me here, Kairat Akhmetov,, who is the head of Freedom Telecom and Kastan, Prakash Sankara, senior Vice President Jio and Harkirit Singh, executive director of NGIC in Ghana, of course Prakash Jio in India, and also representing a lot of international interests that Jio has. Maybe if we could do a quick round of introduction. Kai, if you would start please.

Kairat Akhmetov, Freedom Telecom (00:57):
Hello, I'm Kairat. I'm CEO of Freedom Telecom. I also have a lot of, I call myself a technical CEO. I've been in tech industries since the graduate university in Kazakhstan. I'm quite famous for founding the biggest smart CIC cameras surveillance company. Also now managing telecom in freedom holding. So it's a honor to be here.

Arun Bhikshesvaran, Radisys (01:28):
Absolutely. Thank you. Thank you very much. Prakash.

Prakash Sankara, Jio (01:32):
Hello everybody. And a very good afternoon to everybody so hopefully nobody's sleeping. Alright, that's good. My name is Prakash. I am from Reliance Geo. Like Arun said, I've been with Jio for almost 13 years now since its inception founding. Prior to that I used to work at what now is T-Mobile back then used to be Sprint. I have about 27 years of telecom experience and at Jio I manage product strategy and I also work very closely with our sister companies like Radis and helping them define their strategy and also working with strategic customer accounts, which are primarily the large telecommunications players across the globe. Thank you.

Arun Bhikshesvaran, Radisys (02:21):
Okay, RI,

Harkirit Singh, NGIC (02:22):
Thanks Prakash. I'm Harkirit Singh, I'm the CEO of S and Digital Solutions. I was based out of Ghana. I founded that company back in 2020 and we are now launching a 4G 5G network as a service model to democratize data to build borderless networks. And I'm the executive director of NextGen Reco. I've been in the market for about 30 years. I was responsible for the first two G launch in India with the S Swisscom 3G launch in uk 0 3, 0 3, 0 3 4, 3 networks, 4G launch in UK with Vodafone UK and we just launched the 5G in Ghana last year. So we are looking into this discussion to really see how the impact of technology really defines what we really actually achieve as a societal impact towards creating more and more digital dividends in the country. Thanks.

Arun Bhikshesvaran, Radisys (03:20):
Fantastic. On that, which is a great point. Let's segue to you. Prakash Jio is an inspiration for many people around the world. The trajectory over the last seven years really has actually inspired both Kaira and Hari in many ways. It is beyond telecom, what Jio has done. Can you recap the journey a little bit, the multifaceted impact on society that Harri just touched upon?

Prakash Sankara, Jio (03:46):
Well, let's put it this way, the journey was never easy. We started in 2012. There was a lot of planning trying to figure out what is it that we are really trying to do. When we started, there were 14 operators in India, did we want to become another operator? We went through that whole cycle, right? So it took us almost three years to kind of finally figure out what is it that we wanted to become. And I think the biggest inspiration of course is our chairman, Mr. Banani. And he always had the vision that we are not going to build a telco, we are going to build a digital platform. But the challenge at that point in time in India was that the networks were not there yet, right? Was even though it was a very large market, 14 operators, exorbitantly priced especially for data and voice was still expensive and voice was the primary revenue channel for all those operators.

(04:41):
So we decided that if we have to become a digital operator, we first have to democratize connectivity. Connectivity forms the baseline for everything. And so the first step was to go do something and disrupt the market and do something nobody had done before. And we made a bet on 4G and LTE at that point in time. In 2016 we decided to launch and in fact we made a very brave step and we went with a single vendor solution and that was unheard of, but we made a bet on someone who was an emerging player in that space and that someone was Samsung who now is a big, big telecom vendor. But post that, once we got the subscriber base growing, we gave affordable broadband to everybody, mobile broadband. Then we said, okay, let's make voice free if that's the piece that's kind of holding everybody back.

(05:39):
We gave voice for free and then we started layering on top of the cake, right? Fortunately for us, the government of India also had same plans to go towards digitization and it kind of dovetailed with the government's plan. So it was FinTech going towards UPI enabling UPI across all the subscriber base and then content. And the biggest thing for us is content, delivering content on the mobile in regions that are not probably Europe or America where a lot of people use mobile for content. We added that digital aspect of things and now we are going down the AI space. But again, like I said, giving a solid foundation for connectivity is going to be critical for anything we do.

Arun Bhikshesvaran, Radisys (06:32):
Perfect. What is the situation in your market? Prakash talked about 14 operators and coming in and disrupting. What does it look like in Ghana?

Harkirit Singh, NGIC (06:42):
In Ghana we have the market which is upside down. We have one monopoly and the rest of the two players are actually not performing. The market size is small, we only have 33 million subscribers. They're not too much of investment in the network infrastructure. And if you see the GSMA studies in Africa mostly is like a usage gap. So Ghana is suffering from two things. One is the supply is not there, so nobody is actually getting to the point to supply a lot of data. And second thing is coming up with the devices so they don't have the devices. And you can take the third pillar that Prakash touched upon, which is about getting the content and application. So we were here last year at the same time we are looking into partner with companies who are really innovative and can change the paradigm and bring digital to the society and that's where we partner with Redis a lot and we got a lot of knowledge and understanding what they have done in India and we wanted to replicate the same models starting in Ghana.

(07:49):
So our network as a service model is just not limited to putting infrastructure on towers and things. We want to take it to the consumer. We want to go to the point where we can get those affordable devices to the consumer, get them the content they want to use, get them the application they want to use and we want to turn that around into, as you can say, I was in an investors meeting this morning and say what does differentiate with you because there are a lot of shared networks in Malaysia and happen in Rwanda is happening in Mexico. I said the way we see ourselves is we want to be that player which is enabling and being a catalyst for the S that draws them to make sure that they're actually reducing the CapEx opex and have the ability to acquire customers. So I think that's where we see a switch that we will try to plug on. And the plan is that if we are successful in Ghana with the model we are putting together, we will be actually going pan Africa. So we are already in discussions with six or seven countries who want to deploy the same model and we want to bring those dividends to the society and those will only come when we actually connect the devices to the network and go back into the platform applications and content

Arun Bhikshesvaran, Radisys (09:05):
Freedom is a famous brand in Kazaki. Stan, what's the motivation to come into telecom?

Kairat Akhmetov, Freedom Telecom (09:12):
Well also in Kazakhstan, maybe in Ghana telecom industry was underinvested for a long time and we are in top 30 for e ggo technologies, electronic government. I think we are in top 10 for FinTech, but for connectivity for mobile we are about in 16 by operating for fixed broadband. We just in last two years managed to go up from 100 place to 88 0 place. So it really our founder Timor of freedom holding for that, we really deserve much better connectivity because of we are also going into super app to FinTech and no matter how good is your mobile application, if connectivity is not working well, you will be suffering. So that's how Teamwork decided to go there. And actually I wasn't applying for this job, so I was his partner in a serge company in our smart cities business and I was somehow surprised when he offered me this position and I had two conditions so that I will still manage, somehow oversee our smart city business and that I won't move to cold dust. I just moved out there, my kids are in normality. But the first thing about business that he said is that look at Jio

(11:04):
That he was inspired by Jio case and so we brought him to U, we met several times. So we really want to do same inspiring things, maybe not technologically same as Jio did in India because it's like generation ahead. But what we see as a freedom, holding as freedom to become what we want to bring to our society is the same level of improvement or even bigger like Joe did to India.

Arun Bhikshesvaran, Radisys (11:38):
Prakash, this is perfect. Talking about what Jio did in India, what are three things that really aided in this massive disruption in India caused by gu?

Prakash Sankara, Jio (11:49):
So I think if I pick three things, things that aided in the Jio transformation one, which I think we are lucky being in India is scale and the scale does help. We have 1.4 billion people, so that does help a lot. But one of the things that we, and Arun, you and I have spoken about this as a strategy we want to take and which is our chairman's wish too, is how can we take that disruption into other nations or even continents because if Jio has achieved scale in certain things, can other players who are trying to change the socioeconomic aspects of their region can they benefit from it? Which is what we are striving to do. And it's not just about connectivity. I mean there are areas where people want, especially in the region close to us, the Asian region, if you take Sri Lanka for example, or you take Nepal for example, we are working closely with those operators because everybody wants to go to a digital, private public infrastructure and implement something like UPI and UPI or even things like ADA and which people in the west take it for granted.

(13:08):
People have social security cards, medicaid cards, and you have all these things that it's a well organized system that's been put in place. But if you look at a lot of these regions, how do you bring healthcare to people? Well the first step is even identifying who these people are. Identity is an issue because you can't even figure out where these people are, what they do. There's a lot of transient migration that's happening. So for us it's like that's one thing. And the other thing that I see that we have been able to transform is with connectivity is like I said, is education and healthcare, right? Because a few things that we are working on where Jio is bringing in the technology in India, but not necessarily the front end, it's done by the Reliance Foundation where we can take this connectivity anywhere, everywhere and you can see Mimosa going and doing it on Mount Everest and things like those and then they go in with the healthcare services.

(14:11):
How do we bring healthcare across the board to everybody? How do you bring education? Because there's still a huge divide when it comes to education and how do you bring content? We have partnered with Khan Academy and all these people, but how do you get that content delivered to people? And even if it's one of our small Jio Barth phones, even though it's a 4G phone, it's really affordable device, but it's still got 4G in it and we still made sure that it'll render content. If a doctor wants to do a video call, the doctor can still do a video call. So it's kind of these transformational things that I think brings satisfaction, at least to me when I see it's not purely about going selling bits and bytes and saying, okay, I'm charging $10 ARPU or something like that. But then what's the transitional effect that brings to the table for the masses, right? Sure.

Arun Bhikshesvaran, Radisys (15:06):
So thank you Prakash ra. If there were a couple of things that you would like to leverage from the Jio experience, what would those be?

Kairat Akhmetov, Freedom Telecom (15:19):
I heard the joke that Jio when they launched they had a billing problem. So they offer a data for free and we will be doing something like this, maybe offering a substantial amount of CIS for free at the beginning. But oral we really want to leverage of how to be bold at the market where nobody waiting, whereas your competitors is not waiting for you, but customers do. So we really want to make our society economics welfare. So that's I think key things and also to leverage ecosystem approach that we sometime jog. Also love that our strategy may be called the movie Everything everywhere at once. So we do have our filming studios as well producing our TV series over the top. I really like working with partners Bold decision. That's what we will do.

Arun Bhikshesvaran, Radisys (16:40):
Wonderful question. What are you doing that is disruptive in Ghana and potentially for all of Africa?

Harkirit Singh, NGIC (16:51):
I think from a disruption perspective, the model itself is very disruptive. It is challenging the status quo because if you see the telcos today before Jio came in, the model is all inverted. If you see the Telefonica itself and you go back let's say early 2010 and 11, Telefonica was valued at more than 300 or 400 billion. The value of Telefonica today is less than 30 billion. So something is wrong in the telco industry, fundamentally wrong. And when you look into Africa, the market is full of islands, you still have two G, which is prevailing as a technology. 3G is the second part of the technology which is largely deployed. 4G is very scattered. So we are in 2025 and we're looking at these islands and creating what you call a digital divide across the continent because from G you can cover 90, 95, 3G, you need to increase the infrastructure and we will be like 75, 80% coverage.

(17:57):
4G is less and 5G is much lesser. So what we want to bring in as a disruption to the market is to see how the same resources can be utilized by all the MNOs. Okay. The fundamental key to the success of all of this is that you actually bring down the cost of the CapEx. So as distributed across the MNOs, you bring down the cost of Oex. There is no cost of spectrum. So we are paying for the spectrum and do you enable them in a way where they can differentiate on creating more applications, customer service, and creating real value to the society? Okay. Now part of this disruptive model is that we are not limiting the infrastructure, which is a neutral host infrastructure to just MNOs. Because 5G inherently has a lot of different business cases that can be build up like building up new digital entrepreneurs.

(18:56):
So creating an economy that actually increases the society, economics, making the society most more prosperous. Because if you see now until now there will be one single MNO which is monopolizing the market. It is just limiting itself to its CapEx deployment and any investment to areas where it can make money. Whereas our part of the thing is like if you give the spectrum to a neutral host network as service operator, we commit to deploy 4G, 5G everywhere because our economics from a unit economics perspective and the scale is basically dividing and using that infrastructure across MNOs, across ISPs. So we are bringing a complete change, a new paradigm in the market that will break out the silos and the status quo that exists. And we are facing a lot of challenges and Arun is aware of it because minerals are not able to understand what they do because they love their network.

(19:53):
The CTOs love the network like this. Yeah, I won't let it give it away. Then you have the tower companies who say, oh, I want to have three different players on the tower. Now you're only one. But that is the model happening because you can't change something that has been set in motion. Nobody can change it. There is nothing that can change a destiny to happen, simple as that. So we want to break any barriers to that. We want to reduce the barriers for any digital entrepreneur coming into the market and deploy the system and any application, any business case it wants within less than 30 days. So we are talking to some new people who are coming, which who have no expertise around anything on Onos and telcos, but they have got brilliant ideas of businesses which never ever you can say would have been successful, even going beyond the phase of having some initial presentation.

(20:49):
So there is this company that actually moves cash in transit for all of the banks in Ghana. They've got security vehicles there. They've been looking for a solution that how do they break into the market, create more level of intimacy with the customers, tell them how the tracking is happening and things like that. And also build up their own portfolio of high speed broadband services. Because some of these applications and CCTs and all help the customer to have that level of assurance that the things are moving fast because you're moving a couple of million million of cash at a certain point of time. And as part of that model, they're now saying, guys, can I actually create a space for me where I can do autonomous vehicle testing in Ghana because now 5G is available, there is low latency networks and stuff. So the industry itself and the market itself that is defining it is becoming more exciting. So I think that's the disruption you want to bring where anybody who's like any age doesn't matter is 18 years or 50 years wants to go in and create a business model on a digital infrastructure very, it doesn't have to put a CapEx, it doesn't have to put an opex, doesn't have to buy a spectrum, only get an ISP license and a connecting license and goes and deliver a service.

Arun Bhikshesvaran, Radisys (22:09):
Very interesting. You touched upon something which I think is a common thread across all of you. You talked about moving lots of money. FinTech is a very hot subject across the world. Your holding company is in the financial products business. What do you think is the future of FinTech and intersection with your business? How important is this?

Kairat Akhmetov, Freedom Telecom (22:30):
So the future is ecosystem of course. And now we launch for example, for example, lifestyle businesses integrated into our super app like grocery shopping, movie tickets. And with the launch of referral program inside the super app, our bank who is managing the super app. So threefold, increase in users in three months. So whole first year of launching super app, we had like half million of subscribers after launching a referral program that we were giving away less than $10 peripheral, like three or $5 per referring a friend. We saw 1 million new customers in two months. So we really believe that we are on the right track with our system and ability to, and we had problems like crashing up, like high load, et cetera. So the ability of managing this high growth, combining many different tech companies into some data lake on cloud, analyzing this with AI and making better and better products. We really need to be flexible and move forward sometimes making mistakes. But overall, believing in our foundation and delivering great products to customers is the key

Arun Bhikshesvaran, Radisys (24:12):
Harri, FinTech and intersection with your business.

Harkirit Singh, NGIC (24:17):
So in African markets and especially in Ghana, mobile money is where the most part of the business is done. And mobile money is all on two G, 3G, whatever you call. Every transaction is done through momos, let's called mobile money. So for us, the connectivity is the key actually to actually increase those financial inclusion. So we build up a program about two, three years ago for bringing connectivity to rural areas in Ghana and we actually acquired close to about two, two and a half million new subscribers. And we are asked, so that connectivity helped these people to have a proper mobile money transactions. And the question is not about the moving the money. The question is about what is the value of that money to that person and the value of that money to that person is depending upon how much money he can make on the money that he is getting.

(25:15):
So the idea is to create commerce. So we deployed about close to about 15, 1700 sites is all 3G in rural areas in Ghana. And initially lot of consultants, lot of the top four consultants were advising the government and the funds that having a 3G in these places is completely a nonsense approach. And we were standing and saying that you can't take Africa 50 years back and we won. And the 3G was launched in those places and it's a shared network. All three operators empty and tele Rome seamlessly on it as national roaming. And today we are generating about close to about 300 terabytes of data, more than 150 millions of voice. It's very small cause it's Ghana, the size is small, but the impact is huge. So we did a whole survey of these communities where the 3G network is there and there are four key areas.

(26:13):
What is happening first is they themselves are buying smart devices. So all of these consultants that came with lots of millions of dollars of fees were saying people needs to be educated. They don't have money, they don't have electricity, and it's the bush, nobody's going to use it. But our experience is different because you bring an internet to a place, you connect that particular place with 6 billion people around the world. So your health will go to that place, your education will go to that place, your commerce will go to that place. I think that's the beauty of bringing internet. The four things are first, they're buying their own devices. So nobody's financing. They're finding ways to buy their own devices. Second, they're having access to health from where they are. They can now connect, get their prescriptions, speak to the doctors. Education. The nearest schools were like 20, 30, 40 kilometers to walk. They can reach out to the teachers, get the material online and learn. And fourth and biggest impact is consumer like the creating businesses. So they were actually producing vegetables, growing vegetables and stuff and then going and traveling all the way to actually get the produce done. And by the time they will lose the money and the time and they cannot do that. They can sell that produce online. The buyer itself comes and collects the produce and goes,

Arun Bhikshesvaran, Radisys (27:39):
There you go.

Harkirit Singh, NGIC (27:39):
So we are contributing much more than just doing a Momo transaction and everything is happening on the MoMA. So the idea of connectivity is critical to achieve those things where you actually reduce the digital divide and increase financial inclusion.

Arun Bhikshesvaran, Radisys (27:55):
Wonderful. Rad. 12 months from now, what are you going to be celebrating?

Kairat Akhmetov, Freedom Telecom (28:02):
I sure hope that we'll be celebrating our big success of FWA on fixed viral success. We have a good spectrum and 79 we have quite wide, at least 100 megahertz in most cities, like two 300 megahertz of that spectrum. Also hope we will celebrate our inter city interconnectivity like fiber. We have our own machinery. It's also like non-Orthodox approach that we buy our own machinery, our own people, and we lay the direct barrier fiber ourselves and we hope we'll also we'll launch some very good and great green data centers like prefabricated or somehow along this and the south of Kazakhstan where we'll be laying new fiber. There is a lot of sun and I believe that green energy now and battery storage is getting more and more viable. So we really hope that we'll change the landscape and improve connectivity and data centers for kastan.

Arun Bhikshesvaran, Radisys (29:17):
Wow, it is fantastic. It's great to hear Prakash 12 months from now, what are you going to be celebrating?

Prakash Sankara, Jio (29:24):
Just wanted to do one clarification on what Carat said. We didn't have issues with the billing system. So a little bit of story there. It was actually a go-to-market strategy because we went around to the different large billing system providers

(29:42):
And the costs were out of the, they were just inflated. So we decided to build, we still have partners, but we decided to build majority of that system. But then when we went to our chairman and we said, okay, that's going to take six months, we said, okay, that's not acceptable. I have to launch. So he said, how about this? We come up with the go-to-market where we do a large field trial, we give it away for free for six months until we get our billing systems done. And then what we did magically is one day people were just starting to get used to the data, they starting to get used to 4G. And then we started putting in the offers. And of course we did not want to get their eyes to glaze over and saying, oh, now all of a sudden you have to pay like a hundred rupees or 200 rupees.

(30:27):
You kind of start slow and go that way. For us, Arun, 12 months from now, what we are looking forward to is there are a few things that we are also doing in the data center space. We are planning to build one of the largest data centers in Gujarat that will be covered by clean, sustainable energy. We do have some investments in solar. We have bought a few companies that provide solar panels. So we'll be leveraging those sister companies that we have. And this is going to be pretty significant because our chairman has announced at the end of the day we want to do 10 gigawatts is what our goal is. We will start with the one gigawatt data center and then build it. And just in our style, we like to make a cookie cutter so that it can be replicatable and we are not making customized because that just increases the investment. So AI data centers is one piece and then AI is going to be a focus even from a software perspective.

(31:33):
We are going to be focused on a lot of the ai, inferencing, AI based applications. We are going to bring AI into all aspects, even from a network perspective. We just made an announcement yesterday on AI partnering with some of the large players in the network space and we want to bring that telco automation even into our telco business and then eventually bring it into our retail business, bring it into our health sciences. So just go across all the different aspects, media, entertainment, all those aspects. So looking forward to that. Big ai, I dunno if the AI ation, is that a right word? Maybe I'm making up of

Arun Bhikshesvaran, Radisys (32:20):
Many

Prakash Sankara, Jio (32:20):
Things. Of many things, right? Is something we are looking forward to. And then another aspect area that we are focused on, and I know we are working very closely with Radis because they provide us a lot of the technology in that space, is the growth of home broadband. Home broadband is something that we are targeting. We would like to grow it to about 160 million homes and we are working closely with Radius in them helping us enable that, right? Whether it be FTTX, F-W-A-B-W-A, you name it. Right? So that's something else I'm looking forward

Arun Bhikshesvaran, Radisys (32:51):
To. Perfect. Har, great. 12 months from now, what are we celebrating?

Harkirit Singh, NGIC (32:54):
I'm celebrating my 25th marriage anniversary.

Arun Bhikshesvaran, Radisys (32:56):
There you go. So you bring your wife here. Next year we'll do a party for

Harkirit Singh, NGIC (33:02):
You. If I'm still married, I don't know. So we'll see. I think on the series stone we want tomorrow to be successful, we would have covered at least about 40% of the country with 4G and 5G. We've launch aerial fiber as a product. We have made a commitment of training around thousand people, a thousand engineers in Ghana, which also comes from the digital exploration lab that Radis will work with us and we'll be looking forward to an announcement sometime in July about another five or six countries where we launched the same network as a service model. So I think from the perspective of next 12 months, the whole focus is to make this model in Ghana a blueprint of success in success in Africa, and then launch it into multiple countries.

Arun Bhikshesvaran, Radisys (33:56):
Fantastic, fantastic. We have a theme there. I'm just looking at it. It says transform communities, lives and economies. I think this applies to all your companies, what you're doing. Thank you very much for being here this afternoon. It's been a pleasure. Ladies and gentlemen, please, let's give them a big hand. Thank you.