Trai invites stakeholders' views for telecom exit policy

NEW DELHI: Telecom Regulatory Authority of India ( Trai) has invited views from stakeholders for drafting a policy and guidelines for companies who want to exit the telecom space crowded with 14 players.

On Friday, Trai issued a pre-consultation paper - a first step to proposing the exit policy - and asked for comments and views of the industry before January 16.

The policy will look to address several issues, such as the terms and conditions of exiting and whether partial or complete surrender of spectrum would be allowed. More pertinent issues of the time-frame of exiting and method of shifting customers from one operator to another would have to be addressed, besides issues of partial or full refund of entry fee, release of bank guarantees and settling of liabilities of the operator.

Under present licencing norms, telecos do not have an exit-policy. This means that a national service provider pays 1,650 crore per permit but has no option to surrender it, along with the start-up airwaves of 4.4 MHz. The policy, once created, will benefit new telecom players, such as Loop, Videocon and others, who received mobile permits in 2008, but have neither been able to generate revenues nor sustain subscriber numbers over the last couple of years.