Mobilepundit writes…Sunil Jain makes compelling arguments against TRAI’s recommendation of not allowing entry of new operators to provide 3G services in the country. Recommend that you read the full article.
This was the import of a recommendation made by the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India on 3G spectrum last September but, thankfully, the then Telecom Minister Dayanidhi Maran chose to ignore it and said he’d invite new players into the field. Now that Maran’s been asked to go, the industry’s making one valiant attempt to win over his successor into accepting Trai’s recommendations in toto.
Trai’s recommendations, of course, were amazing and, presumably, Maran saw through the inconsistencies in them. While the mobile phone firms argued that 3G services (which allow vastly superior services to be offered wirelessly, including internet data speeds of at least 144 kbps) should be given to them without a one-time entry fee as they were just an extension of their existing 2G licences, Trai rejected this.
It said 3G was a new service and so it should be auctioned. But if it was a new service, how did Trai arrive at the conclusion that the auction should be limited to just the existing mobile phone players- that’s both the GSM-cellular lot as well as the CDMA-lot (also called the Unified Access Service Licence, or UASL holders) like Reliance Communications and the Tatas?