DoT panel wants TRAI to review recos on licence fee

An internal committee, set up by the Department of Telecom on Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI) recommendations on spectrum pricing and licensing framework has disagreed with the sectoral regulator on various points and has sought its views on these issues again.

TRAI had proposed that under new licensing regime, annual licence fee should be 6% of annual gross revenue (AGR) but the DoT committee wants it to be higher at 8.5% of AGR. Although the DoT panel has agreed to the new licence categories and their fees, it has rejected TRAI's proposal to implement it from April 1, 2012, which was aimed at creating level playing field between new and old service providers.

The telecom regulator's recommendations on spectrum pricing and management proposed an entry fee of Rs 20 crore for nationwide unified licence, which the panel has accepted. It recommended entry fee of Rs 2 crore for the metros and category A service areas; Rs 1 crore for category B and Rs 0.5 crore for category C service areas. For V-SAT licences, it recommended an entry fee of Rs 30 lakh and Rs 10,000 for licences through authorisation.

Under the present framework, telecom licences can be given on First-Come, First-Serve basis, where a unified access service licence comes bundled with 6.2 Mhz spectrum. The last pan-India licences were issued for Rs 1,658 crore in 2008. Since the new licences will not have spectrum bundled with them, an applicant will only have to pay entry fee which will be finalised by DoT.

DoT has agreed with TRAI's view that in future there will be only four kind of licences -- Unified licence, Class licence, Licensing through Authorisation and Broadcasting licences.

Unified licence will enable operators to offer all services -- CMTS, NLD, ILD, Internet, IP-I and Global Mobile Personal Communication by Satellite (GMPCS). The committee has sought further recommendations from TRAI on GMPCS services under state level Unified License. 

Class licence will cover VSAT services, while licensing through authorisation will cover Public Mobile Radio Trunk Service (PMRTS), radio paging, voice mail, audio tex, unified messaging service.

DoT's committee has asked to keep broadcasting licences under purview of the Information and Broadcasting Ministry. Under the new proposed framework, the licences will not be bundled with spectrum. An applicant will have to choose a license for the kind of service he wants to provide and pay
separately for spectrum required to run the service.