A special committee, which was constituted to prepare Unified Licence document, has recommended two licences—Unified License (National) and Unified Licence (Service Area) for the telecom operators.
The committee has taken the decision after examining the recommendations from the Department of Telecommunications (DoT) and the Telecom regulatory Authority of India (TRAI). It has also considered related objects of the National Telecom Policy on this.
The DoT has earlier proposed to split the unified licence (UL) for access service into two sub sets-UL (Network Services) and UL (Service Delivery) that could increase competition and lessen regulatory interference.
The DoT had suggested this based on the recommendations made by TRAI. TRAI has recommended a national level or service-area level unified licence and a separate wireless operating licence for telecom operators, following the suggestions of the National Telecom Policy 2012, which had directed delinking of spectrum allocation from licencing.
The committee proposed Unified License (National) will be a combination of telecom services and would be delinked with spectrum and will have limited terms and conditions for spectrum. This will help administering services at a national level, the committee has stated in a note.
The entry level fee for the Unified License (National) will be one-time non-refundable Rs 15 crore. Networth and equity requirement will be Rs 25 crore for an interested licensee.
Existing existing licensees will have to migrate to the new unified licencing polcy, as recommended by the committee.
The DoT, in its recommendations, had said that there might be scenarios where existing registered operators may not like to opt for UL as they do not want to provide all set of services at the national level and are quite satisfied with providing just network infrastructure to other licensees.
On the other hand, the DoT said UL (Service Delivery) licensees would also support all type of MVNO and reseller options ranging from whole of the service area or part, sometimes restricted to district level services.
The need for new licences was also necessitated by the re-entry of telecom operators, including the Indian unit of Norway’s Telenor and Videocon Industries after their licences were cancelled by a Supreme Court order in February last. Both Telenor and Videocon won spectrum in the auction in November.
The DoT had, in its recommendation, said that the proposed UL (Service Delivery) would provision array of services to the end users through the facilities obtained from UL or UL (Network Service). So, the UL (Service Delivery) licensee would not require creating its own full infrastructure and at the same time delivers the service to the end user on a single platform.