Eminent telecom industry leader Srinath N was named the VOICE&DATA Telecom Person of the Year 2008 by Pradeep Gupta, chairman of CyberMedia, publishers of VOICE&DATA. Wajahat Habibullah, chief information commissioner, Central Information Commission, presented the award to Srinath at the V&D 100 Awards function.

Srinath N, MD and CEO of Tata Communications was chosen for the honor for his role in transforming erstwhile VSNL from a domestic player to a multinational telecom company.

IMImobile was the Emerging Company of the Year, and was awarded for its significant contribution in the VAS space.

Acme Tele Power MD, Manoj Upadhyay, was awarded the Technovator of the Year. He was conferred the honor for his remarkable contribution in providing innovative, energy efficient, and environment-friendly products for passive telecom infrastructure.

Pradeep Gupta, chairman, Cybermedia said, Telecom is bridging the digital divide. And operators have actually started focusing on rural and suburban areas in a big way. More than half the new mobile subscriber additions are from places with less than 20 lakh population.

Touching upon the challenges for the telecom industry in the current year, Prasanto K Roy, chief editor of Voice&Data said, The big challenges from the regulatory viewpoint will be the release of spectrum to telcos, and mobile number portability. The rollout of 3G and WiMax during the year will be key to the spread of the Internet, given that India will once again miss achieving its broadband penetration targets this year.

In the handsets category Bharti Teletech, LG Electronics, and Nokia were declared the winners in the fixed phones, fixed wireless phones, and mobile phones category, respectively. For telecom software, network integration, network storage, network management services the winners were TCS, Wipro Infotech, EMC, and HCL Comnet, respectively.

In the Infrastructure and Equipment category the winners were Ericsson for wireless infrastructure, Cisco Systems for enterprise equipment, and Nokia for telecom equipment.