Highlights of draft National Telecoms Policy 2011

Communications minister Kapil Sibal will unveil the draft National Telecoms Policy 2011 today, containing new rules for the sector.

The revised rules, which will replace the existing framework that has been in place since 1999, aims to make the country’s telecommunications sector more transparent, relax merger and acquisition norms to encourage consolidation and also give more teeth to sector regulator Trai.

Sibal had already announced that new policy will de-link licences from spectrum and had added that the tenure of mobile permits would be halved to 10 years when they come up for renewal. The draft plan also proposes to do away with roaming charges, introduce a stronger customer grievance redressal mechanism, recognize telecoms as an infrastructure sector giving it tax concessions, and extend preferential status to ‘Made in India’ hardware products.

Scarred by one of the biggest scandals in the country that led to the resignation and subsequent arrest of former communications minister A Raja, Sibal, on January 1 this year, after taking charge as the new minister, had said the government would bring in transparency and a level playing field for all service providers in the new telecom policy.

ET reviewed a copy of the draft National Telecoms Policy, the highlights of which are as follows:

1. Create knowledge based society through proliferation of broadband – provide ‘broadband on demand’ by 2015. Achieve target of 175 million broadband users by 2017 and 600 million by 2020.

2. To promote R&D & product development in telecom

3. To make India a global hub for telecom equipment manufacturing

4. Increase rural tele-density from 35% to 60% by 2017 and to 100% by 2020.

5. 80% of telecom networks to be domestically manufactured by 2020

1. Abolish roaming charges

2. Mobile Number Portability, which is currently restricted to a circle-level basis, to be enhanced to allow consumers to retain their mobile numbers when they move to a new city or any location in the country without having to pay ‘roaming charges’.

3. Strengthen grievance redressal mechanisms

4. Broadband speeds to be revised to 512 kbps & further to 2 Mbps by 2015 & 100 Mbps by 2020

5. Regulator to enhance consumer awareness on tariffs, services

6. Strengthen consumer protection act

1. Free up 300 MHz of airwaves for commercial telephony by 2017 & another 200 MHz of spectrum by 2020

2. All future spectrum allocations will be priced at market rates

3. Allow spectrum pooling, sharing & trading

4. Prepare a roadmap for spectrum availability for next 5 years

5. Reserve small amounts of spectrum in certain frequencies for indigenous development of products & technologies

6. Enact ‘Spectrum Act’, to deal with all issues connected with mobile permits, including re-farming, pricing of this resource, withdrawal of allotted spectrum and norms for sharing and trading.

7. To promote use of white space with low power devices

1. To frame an exit policy for new entrants to surrender their mobile permits & airwaves

2. Delink licence from spectrum. Make mobile permits technology neutral and divide them into 2 categories – Network Service Operator & Service Delivery Operator

3. Allow sharing of networks

4. Regulate value added services, especially the carriage charge

5. To provide clear rules for renewal of all mobile permits

6. To put in place legal, regulatory and licensing framework for convergence of services, networks and devices

7. Move towards an unified licensing regime that will allow operators to offer any service

8. Address the Right of Way issues in setting up of telecom infrastructure

9. Relaxed M&A norms to allow consolidation

1. Recognizing telecom as infrastructure sector

2. Facilitate increased use of green tech for powering towers

3. Reducing carbon footprint of telecom sector

1. Develop and deploy systems for lawful assistance

2. Service providers to ensure security of network and data flowing in it

3. Building capacity for lawful interception and monitoring

4. Standardisation of telecom equipment

5. Govt and private sector to share cost of implementing security measures

1. Promote training institutes in rural and urban areas

2. Encourage collaboration with IITs and other institutes

3. Form a high-level apex body – industry, academia and PSUs - to oversee skill development

1. Create telecom finance corporation to facilitate investment in the sector

2. Rationalise taxes affecting the sector to make services more affordable

1. Review encryption, security, taxation, internconnection issues

2. To take steps to reduce cost of service delivery

3. Transition from IPv4 to IPv6; encourage applications and R&D on IPv6

4. Formulate policy on Cloud services

5. Adopt best practices on privacy, network security, law enforcement assistance, prevention of cross border data flow

1. Strong and independent regulator with more powers

2. Review Indian telegraph act with stakeholders

3. DoT to look after licencing and spectrum allocation, ministry to focus on policy making

4. Strengthen DoT units to monitor and enforce licence conditions

5. Strengthen public grievances cell