Trai paper on broadband next month, WhatsApp and Skype to follow

The Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (Trai) will come out with a comprehensive consultation paper on broadband next month, chairman Rahul Khullar said on Wednesday. In the consultation process, the regulator will seek views from the industry stakeholders and public on broadband in the country.

Based on the views, Trai will give its final recommendations."Hopefully, we will come out with paper on broadband may be by end of next month," Khullar said at a telecom summit organised by industry chamber Assocham. The consultation paper will deal with issues related to rollout of broadband services, he added.

Khullar said the regulator is also planning to issue another consultation paper to discuss possible regulatory framework for the over-the-top (OTT) applications like WhatsApp, Skype, Viber, WeChat, among others. The regulator will give its recommendation after the consultation. At present, the OTT players are not regulated and telecom operators want the OTT players to pay connectivity charges or to get into a revenue sharing model, which the OTT players have opposed.

OTT players, who facilitate unlimited messaging free of cost and even calls, have been eating into messaging and value-added services revenue of telecom operators for the past few quarters. Consumers are currently required paying the data charges only. Speaking on ongoing broadband, Khullar said almost nothing has been done in the National Optical Fibre Network (NOFN) project. "Our progress has been very disappointing. Of 1.8 kilometres (km) optic fibre cable that has been ordered, 15,000 km has been delivered which is less than 10%t. Of the six lakh km for ducting, actual achievement is 2,000 km which is roughly about 0.3%... There are lessons to be learnt from this. We didn't go as far as we could," said the Trai chairman.

Khullar also said the Government needs to revisit the broadband plans and entrusting more work to the private companies even in building the network infrastructure could be a more cost-effective and efficient way. The Trai chairman also said that the Government should delicence spectrum across all possible bands which are suitable for broadband connectivity.

"We've already sent our recommendations on 700 MHZ as to how it should be deployed, I think very quickly the government needs to come to a decision that are we going to deploy it and when that 700 MHz would be auctioned," Khullar said. According to Trai data, there are just about 61.74 million broadband subscribers in the country till April 2014. But, most of the consumers are on mobile broadband (phones and dongles) while just 14.91 million are using fixed-lined broadband services.