At a meeting telecom minister Kapil Sibal convened on Tuesday, telecom operators voiced their misgivings on some of the recommendations made by sector regulator Trai.
Sibal had called the meeting with all the telecom operators hoping to arrive at a telecom policy agreeable to all.
According to sources, Sibal told the telecom operators that they would have to find a common ground and let him know how best to take the industry forward. However, the operators complained that they weren’t even consulted by Trai for five of the string of recommendations made by the regulator on May 11, 2010. The normal practice is for Trai to have a discussion paper circulated to the operators, who give their views on the subject.
These include the recommendation on future allotment of licences, inclusion of Internet service providers in a category that entails the levy of up to 6% fee, defining the contracted and prescribed amount of spectrum, changing the roll-out obligations criteria, and replacing the unified access service licence with a unified licence.
Trai had recommended that currently the only access service licence that can be given is the UASL, which is bundled with spectrum. The authority argued, however, that there may be some like Internet service provider who do not need spectrum. In order to make provision for such service providers, Trai recommended that spectrum be delinked from the licences to be issued in future, and the future licence be a unified licence. Also, since spectrum availability is no longer the criterion, there needn’t be any cap on the number of access service providers in a service area.
Trai had also said that ISPs hold a licence but pay a licence fee of only Re 1, except for those offering internet telephony. It noted that UASL holders account for the major share of revenues from the service. Hence it recommended a licence fee of 4% for 2010-11, which was to be increased to 6% later.
On the issue of roll-out obligations, the regulator had recommended discontinuing the current practice of covering a specified area in favour of coverage of a certain percentage of the population in the area. At present a licensee has to cover 10% of a district headquarters in the first year and 50% within three years of the effective date of licence, and 90% of the service area in the metros. The authority had said that because of this, even after 15 years of introducing mobile phone services in the country, rural teledensity was below 25%. It had said that from now, a licensee should cover 100% of households within two years in service areas with less than 10,000 households. In places with between 10,000 and 5,000 households, it should cover 50% of the service area within the first two years and the remaining within three years from the effective date. In service areas with between 2,000 and 5,000 households, the service provider must cover 50% of the households within three years from the effective date and the remaining 50% within four years from the effective date.