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Approval for the Bharti Airtel-Telenor deal will come sooner than expected — under a month — a top official at Department of Telecom (DoT) said here on Thursday.
The Supreme Court on Wednesday quashed the DoT’s plea to make Bharti Airtel furnish a bank guarantee of ₹1,499 crore as a pre-condition for approving the mobile phone operator’s buyout of Telenor India, paving the way for the deal to go through.
When asked how soon the approval can happen, DoT Secretary Aruna Sundararajan told presspersons: “Very shortly... it will take the normal processing time and it will be done.” When asked if that could mean a month or so, she said, “Bharti and Telenor (approval) will be much faster than that.”
On the Vodafone-Idea deal, she said, “We have to look at each case separately.” Sundararajan was speaking on the sidelines of the CII Broadband Summit – 2018, ‘Future - Ready Broadband for all in India’.
She also said that the officials of the Telecom Department and the Aviation Ministry will meet next week to chart out the framework and guidelines to start operations of ‘in-flight’ data and voice connectivity.
The decision will pave the way for travellers to use Internet and voice services on mobile phone during flights in the Indian airspace.
In-flight onnectivity
“We plan to hold a meeting on May 14 or 15 with officials of Civil Aviation Ministry on this,” Sundararajan said. She said that telecom operators may or may not be part of the meeting, which will look at evolving a framework for in-flight connectivity.
A separate category of licences will be created for offering such services, at a fee of only ₹1 for each licence.
Telecom Commission had on May 1 cleared the proposal for allowing wider in-flight connectivity .
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