Telcos raise their voice again for a fair share of revenues from OTT players

New Delhi: The telecom industry has reiterated its demand to get a fair share in the revenues from large over-the-top (OTT) platforms at a meeting of top executives of country’s leading telcos with telecom minister Jyotiraditya Scindia Monday.

Officials aware of the details told ET that along with the OTT issue, the telcos brought to the notice of Scindia their concerns regarding satellite spectrum and how a level-playing field should be ensured.

The meeting was attended by Reliance Jio chairman, Akash Ambani, and managing director, Pankaj Pawar, vice chairman of Bharti Enterprises, Rajan Mittal, and Vodafone Idea MD Akshaya Moondra, among others.


The telecom industry also highlighted issues around GST and ways to address some of the pain points, including those concerning input tax credit.

The meeting was part of Scindia’s plans of getting updates about the sector.

A person privy to the details said the issue of satcom spectrum was not discussed in detail, but the telcos expressed their concerns to the minister, who has already previously said that such spectrum needs to be given administratively as per international norms.

The industry demanded that even in administrative mechanisms the level-playing field should be ensured, and airwaves should not be given free or at low rates to firms that plan to offer the same services to consumers across the country.

The Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (Trai) is currently working on the recommendations for satcom spectrum pricing and other modalities.

While the telcos have been consistently raising the issue regarding the fair-share demand, the Department of Telecommunications (DoT) is yet to decide on the matter. The fair-share idea was comprehensively discussed during the recently concluded India Mobile Congress (IMC).

In fact, a senior Meta executive had agreed that the issue was “worthy of exploration” only if telcos don’t discriminate among OTT providers in reaching the end consumer.

“As long as the cost is being borne by the consumer of a service that they (telcos) want to sell to consumers and they don’t discriminate among OTT providers in terms of reaching the consumer, then I think it seems like an area worthy of exploration,” Thomas Navin, director and global head of connectivity policy, Meta, said recently.

Telcos across the world, including Indian players, have been seeking a share in OTT revenues. Telcos say OTT platforms are riding on their networks and earning revenues free-of-cost using infrastructure which telcos spent billions of dollars to set up.

As per industry body Cellular Operators Association of India (COAI), India isn’t looking as an isolated case in this regard, as globally, the demand for fair share is a key issue of contention with major economies like the US, EU, South Korea, Brazil and South Africa exploring solutions to tackle the issue.

In India, the industry has given a proposal to the government that they intend to get a fair share from the large traffic generators (LTGs) only, and startups and small businesses need not pay anything. Much of the network capacities are being utilised by LTGs.

As per telcos, the LTGs need to contribute adequately/proportionately, based on a dynamic model to meet the demands and future modernisation of telecom networks.

As per COAI analysis, telcos have invested an additional Rs 10,000 crore in 2023 to upgrade network infrastructure, primarily to handle the surge in data traffic from top LTGs.