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Rural teledensity a dark spot
(The Economic Times (India) Via Thomson Dialog NewsEdge) Telecom shining?
India's telecom revolution runs the risk of failure if nothing is done to improve rural teledensity. Impressive monthly growth numbers hide the hard truth of an overwhelming urban bias and the complete neglect of the Indian hinterland.
According to latest estimates, teledensity in rural areas is only 1.87% as compared to 40.65% in urban areas. While the right noises are being made by both the government and the industry to address problems, it is not at all clear how long it will take to achieve a less shameful rural teledensity figure.
The regulator Trai gave a few sensible recommendations on growing telecom services in rural India in October 2005. These recommendations need to be considered seriously.
Trai recommended, among other things, that operators share infrastructure, subsidy be used to support infrastructure growth (instead of focusing on VPT and individual DELs), and wireless players be allowed to access the universal service obligation (USO) fund.
It also wanted lower licence and spectrum charges for rural areas and provision of power backup. It is not that no forward movement has been made on these issues.
Operators, considering the increasing saturation levels in cities, are looking to expand into rural areas. There also has been discussion surrounding infrastructure sharing. However, there has been very little movement on the ground.
Even now the focus is largely urban. Spectrum for 3G services still occupies considerable mind-space oblivious of the fact that spectrum deficiency is an urban and not a rural issue.
While data-services can be useful in rural areas, a beginning can be made with voice. An amendment is expected to the Indian Telegraph Act to permit wireless technologies to access the USO fund.
While this is welcome, its scope should be enlarged to permit all kinds of wireless technologies such as WiMax, WiFi etc and not be limited to just GSM and CDMA.
All this and the development of next generation networks will certainly need a unified licensing regime. The government needs to get cracking with tight time-bound targets.
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