DoT rapped over rural telephony

The Ministry of IT and Communications has expressed dissatisfaction over the slow progress on disbursal of Universal Service Obligation Fund for rural telephony. The disbursal was decided upon in a landmark deal between the Department of Telecommunications (DoT) and telecom operators.

The ministry has said the scheme is taking too long to reach the take-off stage and will therefore result in great harm to the government's rural telephony programme.

"If the target of 200 million mobile subscribers is to be achieved by 2007, it is desirable for the government to intervene and ensure the scheme is implemented expeditiously," it has said in a written communication to the DoT.

The ministry added, "The innovative and potentially brilliant scheme of the minister is in serious danger of staying on the drawing board unless matters are quickly brought under control".

It said while "it had been clearly decided that the sharing scheme would involve at least three players" and the government was willing to consider more operators if they were interested, the final draft cut down the number of players to two.

This comes even as experts say present day technology allows sharing by three or more operators without increasing the height or cost of a tower.

The ministry also said the model was moving "further and further away from the concept of sharing" as operators were now seeking more individual subsidy for separate network elements rather than sharing the same.

On backhaul infrastructure, the letter said despite having decided that this cost would be taken care of by setting liberal benchmarks for towers, operators had now proposed that the government provide subsidy for this.

The ministry also said operators were raising a number of procedural and unrelated concerns outside the jurisdiction of the USO administrator such as resolution of interconnection issues.

"The fact that such matters were brought up at all in the meetings show that the discussions lacked focus and application of mind", the letter said.