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The Department of Telecom will soon unveil the New Telecom Policy 2011 and a national broadband plan over the next weeks. Mr R. Chandrashekhar, Secretary, Department of Telecommunications, said that the policy will be forwarded to the Telecom Commission for a review and thereafter to the Cabinet for a final decision.
Addressing an interactive meeting on National Telecom Policy (NTP) 2011 organised by FICCI, Mr Chandrashekhar said that the national broadband plan will lay a strong foundation for broadband infrastructure both for wireless and fixed line. This would require funds on a massive scale as the plan would be rolled out on considerations that would not purely be commercial, he said. The Government is planning to lay an optic fibre cable network across the country at a cost of Rs 30,000 crore.
A FICCI-Ernst & Young report on the telecom sector was also released and it has recommended a seven-point package of measures to overcome the various challenges faced by the sector. The key recommendations made in the report include a single unified licence covering all telecom services, allowing spectrum sharing and trading and lowering the operator's contribution from 5 per cent to 1 per cent of the annual revenues towards the USO fund.
Meanwhile, the Communications and IT Minister, Mr Kapil Sibal, met telecom operators on Wednesday to discuss the proposed broadband policy. Most mobile operators are opposing the idea of spending money from the USO fund to lay an optical fibre cable to the last mile.
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