India telecom minister Manoj Sinha today said that the telecommunications ministry is working on a new telecom policy.
The focus of the new telecom policy will be applications as compared to connectivity in the case of the national telecom policy (NTP 2012).
The telecom minister did not elaborate on the time frame for the new telecom policy.
“The new telecom policy will focus on end users and should look at the opportunities for expanding the availability of telecom services. Expectations of the users to get real time, on-demand bandwidth to run near real-time live applications will be the foundation of the new policy,” Manoj Sinha said at an event in Delhi.
India has nearly 1.2 billion telephone connections, including 1.17 billion wireless phone connections and broadband connections of 276.52 million.
India achieved six-fold increase in data traffic from 561 million GB in the first quarter to 2,988 million GB in the third quarter of 2016-17.
“India plays a key role in 5G standards development and should get a share of the innovations and patents in the 5G technology pool,” Manoj Sinha said.
FDI inflow in telecom sector from April, 2016 to March, 2017 was $5,564 million, which is more than four times the average inflow of about $1.3 billion every year since 2013-14.
The Department of Telecom announced the Central Equipment Identity Register, paving the way for setting up of International Mobile Equipment Identity (IMEI) based device registration and authentication.
The telecom minister did not mention about the poor health of the Indian telecom operators. The chart prepared by TRAI recently indicates that the revenue growth of top operators such as Airtel, Idea Cellular, BSNL, Reliance Jio, among others.
DoT is also considering the TRAI recommendations on addressing telecom consumer grievances and urged the officers to propose a technology driven solution that records, monitors and provides end-to-end monitoring of every grievance.
India’s telecom secretary Aruna Sundararajan urged Department of Telecom to become an engine of transformation and to act as infrastructure builder rather than a regulator.
She urged the officials to achieve the target of 700 to 800 million internet penetration in the next five years.
