Govt asks telcos to spread reach across the country

NEW DELHI: Communications minister A Raja has asked cellular operators to get cracking on rollout of telecom services in rural India. He also asked them to focus on increasing the broadband penetration in the country. In a meeting on Thursday, Raja took stock of their plans to meet the government’s target of 150 million rural subscribers by 2010 from the current 30 million, a source told ET. It may be recalled, when Raja took over as telecom minister he had categorically asserted that rural India is his top priority.

The government recently concluded the tendering process and has awarded the contracts to set up 8,000 telecom towers in rural India with support from the universal service obligation fund (USOF). “During the meet, the minister told cellular operators that a new tender for setting up an additional 10,000 towers in rural India will be issued soon. Officials from the USOF administration were also present,” said the source.

All telecom operators pay 5% of their revenues towards USOF, and currently the unutilised amount in this fund is over Rs 10,000 crore. Operators are also learnt to have demanded their contribution to this fund be reduced to 2.5%. However, the minister was non-committal on the issue.

It is also learnt that operators had sought speedy release of 3G spectrum to roll out high-end data services and help relieve the spectrum crunch. This is because 3G spectrum will allow service providers to migrate their high-end data users to this frequency and free 2G capacity to accommodate low-usage voice customers. It is estimated that as high-end users migrate to 3G, vacated 2G capacity can be used to accommodate at least 3.5 times as many low-end users.

According to sources, CDMA operators had also asked Mr Raja to free another band in the 800 Mhz frequency to enable them to offer wireless broadband services.