Revamping the telecom licence and unifying all services is pro-people and welcome

The stage is being readied once again for a pitched battle in the telecom sector that pits vested interest against the collective good. The government proposes to unify all kinds of services - voice, data and broadcast - under a single licence, to leverage developing technological capabilities for maximum public benefit. Some incumbent operators in different segments would feel threatened by the promised entry of new competition and cry foul. They would allege scams and favouritism and seek to scupper the move.

The government should keep its focus on public welfare and promote policy that allows full deployment of convergent technologies. At present, broadband operators cannot use voice over Internet protocol ( VoIP) to offer voice services to their customers, except when the called party is outside the country. This is a ridiculous limitation of technological capability to shore up the profits of incumbent voice licencees.

After the grant of 3G services, in which voice calls are converted into data packets that ride the airwaves to reach the called party and then get reassembled as voice, VoIP is part of the reality. Smartphones, tablets and Internet-ready smart TVs (or TVs connected to DVD players that access the Internet) blur the distinction between different forms of communication: you can access radio on your phone, TV on your tablet, videoconference with your TV and much more.

Our licensing regime should encourage, not hinder, innovation in the forms and uses of digitised communications, which have the potential to boost the economy’s rate of growth by a couple of percentage points. This does not mean that late entrants (broadband wireless access providers such as RIL) should have unilateral advantage over incumbents (Airtel or DishTV).

More spectrum should be made available for wireless broadband and the commercial terms on which different service providers migrate to a new unified licence (end-user service licence is a terrible name!) should neutralise unfair advantage to anyone. The new regime holds enormous promise for content creators, too.