Mobile obligation

This festive season, rural India has been given a little-noticed gift with real transformative potential. The government has finally agreed to open up the Universal Service Obligation (USO) fund for telecom to mobile telephony by deciding to support shared infrastructure such as towers for five years with the service providers paying only for operating expenses. The only possible loser in this decision is BSNL, which has so far cornered much of the USO fund since its legacy network puts it in the best position to extend fixed line and WLL telephony to rural areas. The benefits of this decision are many. The dense wireless network that now covers urban India can now spread to its villages. Connection costs of wireless telephony are a fraction of wireline options, which means that the USO fund can connect many more consumers for the same support. More rural residents will be able to independently afford telecom services, as access providers reduce tariffs and handset prices to acquire customers, riding on shared infrastructure. Given the links between India and Bharat, more rural consumers will also mean increased usage by existing urban subscribers. Indeed, this may just be the magic bullet that mobile telephony needed to penetrate beyond the metros and larger towns.
A variety of data services like tele-medicine and e-governance and distance education can now have a much wider client base, if BSNL could be persuaded to be less curmudgeonly about pricing its bandwidth. Almost all of BSNL’s exchanges are connected with optic fibre and with mobile networks providing connectivity, the data traffic thus generated can be aggregated and moved on this network, finally putting it to some use. However, even this silver lining has clouds. The department of telecommunication is using an over-specified approach to support passive infrastructure by specifying the network of towers, instead of adopting a simpler approach, such as providing graded support that increases with the number of service providers sharing the infrastructure. Similarly, while the other modalities for support to be provided are yet to be finalised, it is easy to visualise a bureaucratic application of the roll-out targets without regard to service needs. Instead, an independent sample survey to measure ownership of and access to telephones in the relevant geographical areas may be a more effective monitoring approach. But, let us not be churlish at this time of the year. Two cheers for the government are in order.

Source- http://www.financialexpress.com