Bharti Airtel has contested a decision by the Department of Telecom to collect a fee of ₹436 crore for merging its subsidiary Airtel Broadband Services Pvt Ltd (ABSPL) with itself.

The company termed it as “double entry fee”, as it already holds a Unified Access Service Licence (UASL) in all circles.

Bharti Airtel had acquired US-based Qualcomm’s broadband wireless access (BWA) operations last year for an undisclosed sum and later renamed it ABSPL. The New Delhi-based company had earlier sought the DoT’s approval for the merger of ABSPL’s Internet Service Provider (ISP) licence with UASL across four circles.

Entry fee for migration

The DoT had decided to collect an entry fee for migrating the ISP licence to the Unified Licence regime just like it had collected from Reliance Jio.

But Bharti Airtel said it already holds Unified Access licence across Delhi, Mumbai, Haryana and Kerala, which has been acquired after paying the “applicable entry fee”.

“Under the scope of these licences, we are allowed to provide all types of access services including voice, SMS, data, broadband among others and hence do not require additional authorisation to provide any of these services,” the company said in the letter to DoT, seen by BusinessLine .

“We cannot be asked to pay any new entry fee for providing the services which are already allowed in the scope of our existing Unified Access Service Licence. Any proposal to impose new entry fee would tantamount to double entry fee for the same authorisation…,” Airtel said in its letter.

The GSM operator also said non-applicability of any new entry fee is supported by the facts that the Notice Inviting Applications for 3G and BWA spectrum is governed by the licence agreement. Further, M&A guidelines also allow the merger of ISP licence with UASL.

Further, the company also said the new entry fee is valid only for migration of ISP licence and operators did not pay additional entry fee for providing voice services over BWA spectrum.

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