A week after finance ministry raised question marks over the feasibility of the amendment made by the department of telecommunications (DoT) to segregate the revenue arising from 3G and 2G services and levying a spectrum charge of 1% on the incremental revenue from the 3G services, the Cellular Operators Association of India (COAI) has once again said that it is very much possible to segregate the revenue generated from the two technology platforms.
The COAI director-general TV Ramachandran said that there were several precedents to establish that segregation of 2G and 3G revenues was both do-able and was being done.
He cited the government?s dual allocation policy, wherein CDMA and GSM revenue streams of an operator, would be reported separately for payment of licence fee and spectrum usage charges. Hence, if GSM and CDMA revenues could be separately identified and reported, it would be as simple and easy to segregate GSM and WCDMA revenues.
Pointing towards United Kingdom, where segregation of 2G and 3G calls had been implemented on account of different termination rates for 2G and 3G, Ramachandran said that the segregation approach has been followed in Hong Kong for many years, but the Hong Kong model was not being proposed by the industry itself, as there were simpler ways to meet the same end objectives.
He stated that there were several ways in which the 2G and 3G revenues could be segregated and that the industry had recommended two simple approaches that could be considered for adoption by the government, viz the traffic based approach and the call data record (CDR) based approach.
Stating that since the 2G base stations and the 3G base stations were clearly different and distinctly identifiable in the network, COAI has said that segregation could be done either on the basis of the traffic generated by the 2G and 3G base stations respectively.