Gap between telcos network spending and revenue widens beyond ₹10,000 cr

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Telecom industry body COAI has defended service providers' call to increase mobile tariff citing continuous widening of gap between their expense on network deployment and revenue earned by them in return.

While speaking at India Mobile Congress, Cellular Operators Association of India (COAI), Director General, SP Kochhar told PTI that the government has supported a lot to telecom operators with policies like right of way (RoW) but still several authorities continue to charge exorbitant fees for laying network elements.

"Earlier, the gap until 2024 for infrastructure development and revenue received from tariffs was around Rs 10,000 crore. Now it has started increasing even further. Our cost of rolling out networks should be reduced by a reduction in the price of spectrum, levies etc.

"The Centre has come out with a very good ROW policy. It is a different matter that many people have not yet fallen in line and are still charging extremely high," Kochhar said.

He defended the cut down of data packs in entry-level tariff plans by select operators.

Kochhar said that there is stiff competition among four telecom operators and there has been no special trend to show that consumers are migrating to low-cost data options.

"There is a need to find ways to make high network users pay more for the data. 70 per cent of the traffic which flows on our networks is by 4 to 5 LTGs (large traffic generators like YouTube, Netflix, Facebook etc). They pay zero. Nobody will blame OTT but they will blame the network. Our demand to the government is that they (LTGs should contribute to the development of networks," Kochhar said.

He said that investment made by Indian telecom operators is for Indian consumers' benefit and not meant as a medium for profit of international players without bearing any cost.