Duopolicy In Telecom Not Good For India: Scindia
Scindia said Moore's law should play in telecom economics as well as where prices should fall with rise in volumes. “The government is company or technology agnostic and its job is to be customer-centric.
New Delhi: Union telecom minister Jyotiraditya Scindia on Tuesday said duopoly is not good and there must be competition in every sector. “There is intense competition in the country among Internet service providers and the government will issue rules for delicensing 6 gigahertz spectrum before August 15 that will be used for wifi services and bridging of digital divide,” the minister said while addressing at an event of Broadband India Forum.
At present, two major players like Bharti Airtel and Reliance Jio dominate the industry and they are actively providing 4G and 5G services. However, debt-ridden Vodafone Idea has expressed apprehension on its survival in a petition filed before the Supreme Court, while state-run BSNL is yet to roll out 4G and 5G services at a pan-India level. “Our job is to provide as many avenues as possible and within each vertical as well, provide intense competition. It's not good enough having a duopoly of one carrier or two carriers,” Scindia said.
Scinda further said that the country has fiber technology for broadband, wifi and soon there will be satellite services. “We must have competition in every sector. The spectrum will be soon assigned to satellite players on an administrative basis for satellite communications services,” Scindia said without disclosing the timeline for the allocation of spectrum for satcom services.
Scindia said Moore's law should play in telecom economics as well as where prices should fall with rise in volumes. “The government is company or technology agnostic and its job is to be customer-centric. Our responsibility is towards 1.4 billion of our country's brothers and sisters. Our job is to provide every opportunity to them. Our job is to provide every technology to them. Our job is to make sure that Moore's law operates in the economic sphere. That is as volume rises, prices fall,” the minister said.
He said earlier 1 GB mobile data used to cost Rs 287, which has now come down to Rs 9 per GB equal to about 11 cents while the world average cost per GB is $2.49. “India operates at 5 percent of the world’s cost. This is the democratisation of technology. We used to be charged 16 rupees a minute (for a call). Ten years ago we were charged 50 paise a minute. Today we are charged 0.03 paise a minute. I can't even convert that into cents,” the minister said. #End#
