Cross connections

If you're looking for quantum jumps in policy statements, the much-hyped draft' telecom policy from the telecom sub-group is unlikely to...

If you’re looking for quantum jumps in policy statements, the much-hyped draft’ telecom policy from the telecom sub-group is unlikely to satisfy you. The sub-group’s report begins with a great promise, recommending immediate removal of the Department of Telecommunication’s (DoT) monopoly over domestic long distance calls. It also promises the same with regard to VSNL’s expensive stranglehold over the international long distance market by the year 2002. Incidentally, did you know that VSNL’s monopoly ensures that we pay several times more for international calls than that paid by people in countries like the US or the UK?

What makes the draft policy sound really revolutionary, and in tune with the rapid strides that telecom technology makes with each passing day is what in telecom parlance is referred to as the last mile linkage’. The policy says that, while your ordinary land-line telephone service provider could be, say Bharti Telecom, the actual cable to your house could be supplied by your very owncable TV operator — Bharti would bring its own cable till, say, some main point in the locality. This can also be done for, say, your internet connection.

If that sounds revolutionary, consider how technology is changing the face of telecom. Today, it is possible to reduce the cost of long-distance calls to a fraction of what it is, if you use the internet to do your telephoning. It is also possible, in certain areas, to provide cheap mobile phone services by using wireless networks — several Japanese companies, in fact, are successfully working on placing small transmitters in street lamps which means that you can have intra-city mobility for virtually the price of a local call.

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All this, and much more, is possible because of what telecom professionals call convergence’ — in English, that means different forms of telephony such as basic phones, cellular and wireless are converging towards one another. With existing licence holders scared that they would get wiped out if such convergence’ was to beallowed and their relatively cosy duopolies smashed, obviously few favoured any radical shift in the country’s existing telecom policy. The DoT, for its own reasons, wasn’t too favourably inclined towards this either.

So, when the sub-group on telecom was given the responsibility of coming up with a draft policy, itself an input for External Affairs Minister Jaswant Singh’s main panel on telecom, most expected the group to recommend scrapping the existing departmentalised form of licensing (with separate service providers for basic telephony, cellular and internet) in favour of convergence.

Sadly, this hasn’t happened with the sub-group preferring to play safe, perhaps because its members were bitterly divided in their opinions. Divisions in the sub-group also prevented any recommendation on the fractious licence fee issue — the one area where the group seemed completely united relates to strengthening the position of the regulator, the TRAI. All is not lost, of course, with Jaswant Singh’s group stillto take a final view on what the country’s new telecom policy will be. An opportunity to give it some really valuable inputs, however, seems to have been lost.