Govt mulls policy on spectrum for 3G services

The central government will soon announce a policy on spectrum allocation for launching third generation (3G) services in mobile telephony, IT and communications minister Dayanidhi Maran said on Monday.

Inaugurating the new R&D facility of telecom major Ericsson here, he said companies like Ericsson were doing field trials and were prepared to launch 3G services.

Without specifying when the policy would be made public, he said Indian subscribers were rather attuned to voice services than advanced techonologies.

He said 2007 would be an important year for broadband penetration in India. BSNL and MTNL were expected to come out with more rational broadband pricing policy, under which the public would be given 'unlimited' speed, he said.

He said the broadband operators, providing 252 kbps speed, should also give unlimited speed, which he said would be "very relevant for enhancing the country's competitiveness in the IT-enabled services and BPO segment".

In a bid to reduce the call cost of mobile telephony services, the DoT was working with various giants of the industry to set up 'mobile operators' shared towers' by which operators could reduce cost of constructing their own towers.

The central government planned to construct 8,000 to 9,000 towers using the Universal Services Obligation Fund next year, which would enable peneration of mobile services to the villages. This would also help achieve the goal of 250 million services by 2007, he said.

Already 176 million lines have been given, he said, adding each month six million mobile connections were added in the country, which was the highest in the world. (PTI)