The Hindu Business Line : Mobile companies get six months more to complete rural rollouts

SOFTENING its stance, the Communications Ministry has decided to give mobile operators six months more to fulfil their rollout obligations as per the Universal Access Services Licence agreement. The Department of Telecom has therefore put on hold its earlier decision to impose a fine of Rs 406 crore on mobile operators including Airtel, Hutch, Reliance Infocomm, Tata Teleservices, Spice and HFCL.

The move comes after the telecom operators told the Ministry that they could not complete the rollouts due to delays in getting clearances from various government agencies and the lack of adequate spectrum.

This is not the first time that the Government has gone soft on operators for their failure to meet the rollout obligation. Earlier, the Government had let off fixed-line telephone operators who had not met their commitment towards village public telephone by cashing the bank guarantees submitted by the operators. Subsequently, licence norms were also relaxed to remove compulsory rollout in rural areas.

As per the UASL licence agreement, operators are required to roll out telecom services in 10 per cent of each district headquarters within the first year of operations. Once the rollout is complete each operator is required to get a certificate from the Telecom Engineering Centre (TEC), the standardisation unit of DoT.

Operators however blamed the rollout delay on the fact that the Wireless Planning and Coordination (WPC) had not given SACFA clearance in time without which they could not get the radio frequency required to launch cellular services. They also said that the TEC testing guidelines, that is, test schedules and procedures for CDMA operators were released only a month before the one-year deadline set by DoT. "So even if the operators network covers 10 per cent of a district headquarters within a year of obtaining the licence, the TEC testing may get delayed due to the procedures and multiple approvals and clearances involved as a pre-requisite to applying for TEC certification," said an operator.

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