Fresh tention is brewing between the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (Trai) and the department of telecommunications (DoT). While DoT is all for relaxing the roll-out obligations and has even prepared a proposal to this effect, the regulator has initiated a separate exercise by reviewing the roll-out obligations of existing as well as new operators.
According to sources, Trai has powers to review the terms and conditions of licence conditions on a suo-motu basis. Further, before making any amendment in the licence condition, it is mandatory for DoT to seek Trai?s views.
If the Trai report comes out in contrast with the DoT, a new round of tussle is bound to start between the two thus delaying the entire exercise. Earlier this month, the regulator had met the incumbent operators and the new operators in order to assess their investment plans in the telecom sector and know progress on their roll-out obligations. The scenario is bleak as far as new operators are concerned as none of them have placed equipment orders as yet.
According to the current roll-out norms, operators have to attain at least 10% of the total coverage of district headquarters within the first year of allotment of licence and a total of 50% by the third year. Minister for communications and IT A Raja had announced in November that roll-out obligations would be relaxed and the new operators would no longer have to achieve the 10% roll-out obligations within the first year of the grant of the licence.
However, the matter has so far not been approved by the telecom commission nor sent to the regulator. The regulatory authority has on its own initiated the exercise of assessing whether the operators would be able to meet the current roll-out obligations on time or not.
FE had earlier reported that the government was going to ease the roll-out obligations for the new telcos since they were in no position to meet the obligations in the licence. Later while announcing that the DoT was planning to do so, the DoT secretary Siddhartha Behura had said, ?We want to remove the irritants for all operators hence having a roll-out obligation in the first year of operations isn?t feasible?.
The move to relax the roll-out obligations would help new licencees who currently are in no position to meet the roll-out obligations in the first year. New licensees include a host of domestic companies that applied for a unified access service licence (UASL) in 2007, when applications after October 1 were not accepted and the ones after September 25 weren?t processed. Swan Telecom, Datacom, Loop Telecom and Unitech Wireless are amongst the new licensees.