I&B wants cable industry to be on a par with telecom over infrastructure

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New Delhi: The information and broadcasting (I&B) ministry is in the process of recommending an amendment in the state-level legislation and guidelines to incorporate cable operators as eligible entities along with telecom service providers and Internet Service Providers to be granted Rights of Way (RoW), which imply the rights of laying down and owning the infrastructure based on optical fibre or cable wire and transmission towers, the hardware that enables distribution of content.

With rules in most states enabling telecom and Internet service providers licensees to be granted RoW, the cable service providers are pressing for extension of the same rights to them if the era of digitalisation has to be ushered in the cable sector.

Even the broadcast regulator Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (Trai) had earlier suggested amendments in The Cable Television Networks (Regulation) Act, to make it imperative that such rights be made available to licensees of digital cable systems. Trai had said the cost of digital cable services per user can be substantially brought down if service from a digital head-end is supplied to a larger area through optical fibre cable network. Noting that RoW is not available to cable operators as they are not licensed under Section 4 of the Indian Telegraph Act, the regulator had observed in 2005 that it might not be always possible for a cable operator to lay optical fibre network who in turn will have to lease such infrastructure from telecom operators. This arrangement may not prove to be beneficial compared to a scenario when cable operators have their own infrastructure. In sectors like broadband services and IPTV services the cable operators and telecom operators are direct competitors.

The guidelines related to the grant of RoW explicitly spell out only telecom and ISP licensees while the rights of cable operators is more implied and derived in nature, which doesn’t put permission granting authorities under any obligations to grant RoW to cable operators and almost acts as an premise to give preference to telecom and ISP vis-a-vis cable operators while granting such approvals.