Lowering entry barriers

Trai's recommendations are unlikely to bring more operators

The recent recommendation by the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (Trai) on rationalisation of entry fee and bank guarantees has opened up the duopoly debate once again. The 90-page report seeks to encourage competition through substantial reduction in entry fee for telecom service providers. This is in response to a reference made by the Department of Telecommunications last year. The Trai paper covers several categories, including unified licence access service, internet service providers, satellite broadband services, machine-to-machine entities and virtual network operators. For entry-fee rationalisation, the most important and the biggest category is the access service, which will imply new