Led by Rajesh Sreenivasan who has over 15 years’ experience in this highly specialised area, the team and its partners have won numerous awards and accolades for excellence in legal service over the years. Steve Tan, another key partner in the team, has extensive experience in IT projects and in media-related matters including exploitation and commercialisation issues across multiple technological platforms.
WITHIN THIS PRACTICE
Practice areas
Telecoms competition and regulatory
We stay constantly engaged with various regional telecoms regulators on regulatory compliance matters and have been engaged both by the regulators and by the telecoms principals in this area of work. Our role also extends to acting as the Secretariat of the Asia Pacific Carrier Coalition.
We have managed various telecoms regulatory submissions for our clients including engagements by numerous telecoms service providers and equipment manufacturers to secure telecoms regulatory clearance in Singapore and the Asia-Pacific region for over 10 years.
At state level, the team helped the telecoms regulator in Brunei formulate a new telecoms licensing regime, including a regulator’s handbook, telecoms licences and a competition regime.
On the regional front, our practice has been engaged by the ASEAN Secretariat to facilitate a pan-ASEAN forum on legislative and regulatory reforms to collectively address convergence of IT, telecoms and broadcasting across all ASEAN member countries.
We work jointly with our firm’s competition practice headed by Kala Anandarajah with regards to telecoms competition matters in the Asia Pacific region.
Telecoms infrastructure
In this area, we have structured complex telecoms infrastructure procurement agreements based on traditional and PPP models.
We were counsel to various principals in Singapore’s Next Generation National Broadband Network (NGNBN) project.
We were engaged as the lead telecoms counsel in the first MVNO arrangements in both Singapore in 2002 for the US$1 Billion Virgin Mobile MVNO and in the first Malaysian MVNO in 2007.
We helped draft the legal infrastructure for 3G network roll-outs and several satellite services arrangements and submarine cable landing facilities arrangements.
Regionally. we have been engaged in several infrastructure projects – most recently, as lead counsel for one of the largest submarine cable roll-outs in Asia Pacific, the US$1.5 billion Palapa Ring project in Indonesia in 2008.
Information Technology procurement
Since the start of the dot-com era, we’ve been extensively involved in this field. Our broad experience and in-depth knowledge has enabled us to help numerous state level IT major organisations in Malaysia and Indonesia in drafting and negotiating complex IT procurement contracts based on shared services, outsourcing and PPP models.
We travel far and wide to manage projects of this nature, having been involved in various transnational deals with countries including Kazakhstan, Australia, USA, Vietnam, Indonesia, Malaysia, Thailand, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, People’s Republic of China, New Zealand, Canada, UK and Nigeria.
Information Technology regulatory
As one of the region’s most experienced teams in this complex and dynamic area, we have been engaged by numerous state level IT regulatory bodies. For example, we have recently been asked by the World Bank to draft the IT legislation for Mongolia. And the same client has also chosen us to lead an electronic commerce legislative benchmarking exercise involving over 20 East Asian and Pacific nations.
Other major international projects include drafting the ICT legislation for the Kingdom of Lesotho in Africa, and working with the World Bank and the UNDP to draft new ICT laws and regulatory policies for the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan.
We were also engaged by the Commonwealth Secretariat in 2008 and 2009 to co-lead an e-government capacity building exercise involving all Caribbean community member nations. Our lawyers have also served on various Singapore government committees to advise on IT regulatory policies in Singapore.