Days after amending the 3G telecom service guidelines, the DoT has set up a committee to figure out whether there could be a mechanism to segregate revenues of 2G and 3G for a service provider.
DoT move comes days after 3G guidelines change
NEW DELHI: Days after amending the 3G (third generation) telecom service guidelines, the Department of Telecommunications (DoT) has set up a committee to figure out whether there could be a mechanism to segregate revenues of 2G (second generation) and 3G for a service provider.
Recently, amending the 3G guidelines, DoT had specified that 3G licencees would pay an annual spectrum charge of 1% on the incremental revenue due to 3G services after a period of one year.
In an interview to DNA Money earlier this month, the chairman of the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (Trai), Nripendra Misra, had said that “it’s a major exercise to separate the 3G revenue from the overall revenue”.
Subsequently, Misra wrote to DoT secretary Siddhartha Behura, pointing out that the Authority was of the opinion that in case of the service provider having both 2G and 3G spectrum, separation of the revenue between 2G and 3G services will not be possible.
“There will be many common control equipment for 2G and 3G and apportioning the costrevenue to these two services will be very complex,” Misra said.
He has added that there is also the apprehension that “such bifurcation of the revenue may lead to wrong booking of the revenue by some of the service providers and pay lower spectrum charges.”
At a meeting last week, DoT officials and telecom industry representatives discussed the possibility of segregating the revenues of 3G network from 2G revenues for a service provider. During that meeting, DoT officials mentioned the Trai view that it may not be possible to segregate the revenues of 2G from those of 3G.
The Association of Unified Service Providers of India (AUSPI), representing the code division multiple access (CDMA) players like Reliance Communications and Tata Teleservices, said it would not be possible to segregate the revenues from the two streams.
But, the Cellular Operators Association of India (COAI), representing global systems for mobile communications (GSM) players like Bharti, Vodafone and Idea Cellular, argued that it is possible to aggregate the two sets of revenues. It is learnt that COAI said that the practice of segregation of 2G and 3G revenues was already on in Hong Kong, for instance.
The four-member expert committee, which has been set up for assessing the feasibility of segregation of 3G and 2G revenues, will have officials from DoT, Telecom Engineering Centre (which is the technical wing of DoT)) and Dean Planning of IIT Chennai Bhaskar Ramamurthy. The committee will have to submit its report by October 24.
m_nivedita@dnaindia.net
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