TRAI recommendation for domestic long distance by end of September

NEW DELHI, August 24: The Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI) will submit its recommendation for the opening up of domestic long

distance by September end. It was supposed to submit the same by August

15. However, TRAI apparently told the Telecom Commission about the delay,

given the exhaustive process that it needs to undertake to garner public

viewpoint. The public was given a deadline of August 20 to submit their

suggestions and TRAI received 18 such suggestions. This will now be

further processed and if required will be placed before the public once

again or else TRAI will announce its recommendations accordingly.

According to the sources at TRAI, the revenue sharing (5%)

recommendations that TRAI earlier proposed for the paging industry will

also be looked into. These recommendations were based on the request of

DoT, prior to the NTP 99. Then DoT had asked TRAI to give recommendations

for the fourth year onward licensing arrangements with the paging

operators, as per the licensing conditions in NTP 94. However, since the

NTP 99 proposed extension of the license period of paging from 10 to 20

years, the licensing conditions for the extended period will also be

formulated. "Technically speaking the earlier recommendations were

not based on the NTP 99," says the source.

Working on the modalities of revenue sharing for each telecom service

segment, TRAI has prioritized the segments. First segment to have the

recommendation from TRAI is that of e-mail service. "It should be out

in a week's time," says the source in TRAI. Another to follow, in

next 2-3 weeks, will be the CMTS and PMRTS. The segments of FSP (fixed

service provider), VSAT and Paging will take some more time and are low in

the priority list.

Demolishing all the rumors of further delay in the implementation of

Calling Party Protocol (CPP) from November 1, highly placed sources at

TRAI put it as the date cast in stone. According to the sources, there are

certain amendments in the tariff structure of CPP that was proposed in the

TRAI Tariff Order.

It is learned that the call charges for a PSTN to mobile may be reduced

to Rs 3.60 per minute from Rs 3.90 earlier. However, there will not be any

change in the sharing of revenue between DoT and the cellular operator.

(Tariff proposed 85% of the revenue for such calls from PSTN to cellphone

should be given to the cellular operator.) Spilling out the reason for the

postponement of CPP implementation from August 1, 1999, the source

revealed that unpreparedness of DoT to upgrade its countrywide exchanges

to register such revenue sharing system is the main reason. And TRAI has

also been convinced of the logic put forth by DoT. "As a matter of

fact, it took the US four years to implement the CPP regime and we wanted

to do it in a jiffy." According to the TRAI official, it is better to

delay the implementation than facing trouble of implementing in hurry.

However, various cellphone operators seem pretty prepared to implement the

CPP system from Nov 1 itself.