Navratna status

The Telecom Dispute Settlement & Appellate Tribunal (TDSAT) came down heavily on the government for favouring PSU telcos BSNL and MTNL when it came to allotting spectrum, and has asked the government to take back the excess allotted. There’s move evidence of this positive discrimination, this time from the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (Trai), whose latest press release on network congestion gives details of the congestion in the networks of private telcos, but brushes over the congestion in the PSU networks. So, it says 35 Points of Interconnection (PoI) between private mobile players and BSNL/MTNL were congested in December 2008 (down from 68 in September) and another 31 PoIs between private firms were congested (down from 61 in September). The details of each private firm's congested PoI are also given in a separate table; for some reason, however, the congested PoIs of the state-owned telcos are not provided separately.