Telecom minister Kapil Sibal says that all telecom-related issues including spectrum pricing and allocation should be solved by October this year, while the DoT had earlier last month said that the spectrum allocation policy would be approved by November 30. Amidst all this, the third charge sheet for the 2G spectrum scam case has also been postponed for the third time possibly till the end of July, from its original filing date of first week of July, due to a fresh crop of documents submitted by Essar to prove its claim that Loop Telecom which was involved in the 2G scam was not a front for the group.
3G was bought at a whopping price of Rs Rs 67,719 crore by nine telecom operators and was slated to drive mobile advertising, broadband, WLAN, telecom manufacturing, work-from-home, drive untapped markets, and serve as a growth impetus for operators. Yet telecom equipment vendor revenues dropped 2.5 percent at Rs 1,17,039 crore in 2010-11, from Rs 1,20,069 crore in FY 2009-10. While a major reason for this was thought to be security issues with regard to import of Chinese equipment – which make up a majority of 3G equipment suppliers to the Indian market, there are also other issues. Top operators claim to have lakhs of subscribers for their 3G services in just six months of 3G operation, with video-calling and mobile TV being the most popular services. However, customers paint a different picture – claiming to being charged for 3G services which they are not receiving, breaks in the 3G network while downloading and video-calling, inability to use 2G and 3G simultaneously and other network issues which operators blame on initial rollout technicalities.
But the question is why roll out 3G on a network that isn’t 3G-ready? That is not a way of recovering quick ROI for the amount spent on the spectrum auction process.
Huawei said yesterday that it will be rolling out its 4G solutions by December, while Ericsson and NSN have already conducted successful 4G field trials in India. However, BWA rollouts are not expected before 2012.
In the race to constantly leap-frog a generation of technology to keep up with the rest of the world, are we missing out on perfecting our existing technology in India, and denying an 800 million subscriber base of quality services, in a bid to offer a huge quantity of technology? And another question – why are paying subscribers always at the mercy of differences between governing telecom bodies and telecom operators, who argue ceaselessly about additional spectrum and steps to garner more revenue from the same, when existing spectrum is not being harnessed to its full potential?
By Beryl M
