The Hindu Business Line : Bharti plans fixed cellular terminals

THE fixed wireless telephony (FWT) - an increasingly popular service from CDMA operators - Reliance Infocomm, Tata Teleservices and lately, Mahanagar Telephone Nigam Ltd - is soon going to be joined by its counterpart from the GSM world - the Fixed Cellular Terminal (FCT).

Bharti Tele-Ventures is working on a pilot project in Mumbai that will put 1,000 FCTs into use as public long distance telephony centres, said a company source.

Among the CDMA operators, the FWT is already used in public telephony. Tata Indicom uses the FWT for public telephony at its CDMA-enabled telephone booths. Telephone booth operators are independently subscribing to Reliance IndiaMobile's FWT, while Reliance Infocomm on its part, has its independent FWT public telephony plans, said an company official.

With the CDMA-enabled FWT, the advantage is that a public telephone can be set up with ease practically anywhere since the link between the phone and the telephone exchange is wireless. The FCTs from Bharti will function like a public telephone which are SIM-enabled and function on wireless technology, but they won't be physically mobile. However, being wireless, they can installed almost anywhere. To start with, the FCTs will not function like local public call offices; they will be purely public long distance calling centres.

With cellular-to-cellular calls often being cheaper than landline-to-landline, or landline-to-cellular calls, users might find it particularly advantageous to use FCTs rather than the regular public telephones.

The only hurdle left for Bharti Tele-Ventures to clear is the regulatory one. Tariffs are still being worked out for this hybrid service. The CDMA FWT is essentially wireless but not truly mobile, and it is considered no different from a regular fixed line for tariff purposes. Would the GSM FCT follow this tariff pattern?

Since there is one unified licence for access services, whether GSM, CDMA or fixed line, does this follow that the GSM FCT can offer fixed line tariffs?

If it does so, then will a lower cellular-to-cellular tariff be then contradictory if the FCT wants to get the benefits of the fixed line?

Moreover, access deficit charge and interconnection user charges have to be worked into the tariff.

Airtel is working all this out and will submit its tariff plan to the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India, said sources.

Already, Airtel is capable of offering SIM-enabled EPABXs as it has illustrated in its own office where the board line is a `cellular number'.

This way the operator gets to earn more termination charges from its own telephone numbers, said a source.