As per the preliminary suggestions made by committee set-up by the Department of Telecommunications (DoT) Reliance Industries owned Infotel Broadband may have to pay additional charges if it wants to offer voice services to customers in addition to broadband services.
Earlier, DoT had set-up an internal committee to look into issues related to the proposed unified licensing regime. The committee is likely to suggest imposing an entry fee on internet service providers (ISP) for migrating to the new licensing scheme.
Infotel Broadband got an ISP licence in 2010, when it won the broadband spectrum through an auction. At the time of issuing licences, DoT had said that the companies winning the spectrum would be bound by the terms of licence while offering services to users. Since, an ISP licence did not cover in its ambit the voice services, Infotel Broadband could not offer these services to users.
However, under the new unified licencing regime, operators will be permitted to offer all kinds of services. This licence has been de-linked from spectrum and can be obtained by operators by paying a fee Rs 500 million.
However, the government’s move to allow players like Infotel Broadband to convert its ISP licence to a unified licence by paying the Rs 500 million entry fee has been opposed by existing players. These players oppose the move on the grounds that they originally had to pay Rs 16.5 billion to acquire unified access licence.
On the other hand, the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India had suggested that there was no case for any additional fee on broadband companies for migrating to the new unified licence regime. It is of the opinion that the Rs 16.5 billion entry fee for unified access licence was bundled with 4.4 MHz of GSM spectrum. However, the new policy clearly delinks spectrum from the licence and hence no additional fee should be levied on players migrating to unified licencing regime.
No comments:
Post a Comment