Mobile body to allow e-tailers as members

Gets Facebook asassociate member as the first non-telecom company, core membership to remainrestricted to unified licence holders

Soon, e-commerce companies  could have a strong body to lobby for these. The Cellular Operators Association of India (COAI) has decided to allow these in.

The decision comes in the wake of COAI inducting Facebook India Online Services as an associate member on Wednesday. Facebook is the first non-telecom company to join COAI. The membership was restricted to cellular operators or telecom infrastructure companies.

“Initially, the idea of getting more members in COAI came after the government decided to go for unified licensing shifting from the multi-licensing structure where companies were given licences according to their service offerings. But allowing e-commerce companies in would broaden the scope for engagement for all stakeholders. The mobile has become the core platform for even the e-commerce operators. An association like COAI gives these a strong platform to engage better with the government and all the stakeholders in the telecom sector,” Director-General Rajan S Mathews told Business Standard.

Not just Facebook, COAI is working towards getting more members from industries that manufacture or support the functioning, promotion, research development and evolution of mobile communications services. However, the core membership would be restricted to the Unified Licence holders only.

Facebook’s COAI membership comes at a time when cellular operators have been lobbying with the Telecom regulatory Authority of India (Trai) to regulate internet-based over-the-top (OTT) services such as instant messaging applications. Telcos have also been working toward a revenue-sharing model with OTTs, which have been eating into their messaging as well as value-added services (VAS) revenue.

“We feel that Facebook’s active participation in COAI activities will result in mutual value addition and bring the much needed synergy of functioning between the service providers and the content / VAS players,” said Mathews.

Ankhi Das, public policy director (India and South Asia) at Facebook, said: “Joining COAI as an associate member reflects our focus on mobile technologies, access, and our continued desire to work in collaboration with the industry to increase connectivity. We look forward to playing an active role as a member.”

Mathews said the fee structure would be different for associate members. The scope for core membership has expanded because even the internet service providers (ISPs) will come under Unified Licensing regime. This opens the door for ISPs, too, to become core members, he added.

COAI was established in 1995 by the first few GSM operators. At present, it has six core members, and 11 associate members. COAI’s core members include Bharti Airtel, Vodafone India, Idea Cellular, Aircel, Unitech Wireless (now Telewings Communications), Videocon Communications (now Videocon Telecom). Associate members include Alcatel-Lucent India, Cisco Systems India, Ericsson India, IBM India, GTL Infrastructure, Huawei Technologies, Indus Towers, Intel Corporation, Nokia Networks, Qualcomm India, ZTE India, and now Facebook.

The lobby group will also open associate membership for companies that manufacture or supply mobile stations or chipset components used to build mobile stations, infrastructure equipment, system simulators, SIM cards, security systems such as smart cards and authentication centres, billing and accounting systems, data clearing house services, financial clearing house services, signalling clearing house services, among others.