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Messages In This Digest (5 Messages)
1.
India concerned over cross-border telecom signals from Pak
2.
DoT not to exclude portability charges from telcos’ revenue
3.
Lebanon to get additional internet bandwidth from India
4.
Stalement in RBI, competition panel talks over bank M&As
5.
Govt-appointed spl auditor gives clean chit to Bharti
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1.
India concerned over cross-border telecom signals from Pak
New Delhi: It is not only terrorism from Pakistan that is hurting India. Even cross-border telecom signals are causing problems here, prompting moves for taking up this issue with Pakistani establishment for its redressal.
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Signals of Pakistani telecom providers are crossing into Indian territory in Punjab, leading to interference with Indian services.
Concerned over this, India is planning to seek a meeting with Pakistan to resolve the issue, sources said, adding that the department of telecom and ministry of external affairs are holding consultations in this regard.
There are plans to seek a meeting between the departments of telecom of the two countries in June but nothing has been
finalised as the process of consultations are still going on, they said.
Earlier, the Pakistani mobile phone companies had also complained to authorities that interference in frequency bandwidth from Indian cellular operators, Tata Mobile and Reliance Communications, was affecting the quality of their services.
The areas of Lahore, Sialkot, Kasur, Sahiwal, Bahawalnagar and Bahawalpur, which border India, are being affected by the bandwidth interference, representatives of mobile phone companies said.
Pakistan Telecommunication Authority (PTA) and Frequency Allocation Board (FAB) carried out a joint survey following the complaints and said that the interference had caused a "calculable depreciation in quality of mobile telecommunication services in areas of Punjab province located near the border with India."
The interference happens as the Indian CDMA operators and the Pakistani operators usually operate on the very similar bandwidths.
While the Indian CDMA operators have been allocated 824-844 MHz/869-889 MHz band, some Pakistani operators work on 890-915Mhz/935-960Mhz band. So between 889Mhz and 890 Mhz there are some interference.
However, those can be reduced by using proper mechanisms
http://www.dnaindia.com/world/report_india-concerned-over-cross-border-telecom-signals-from-pak_1358933
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2.
DoT not to exclude portability charges from telcos’ revenue
New Delhi: The department of telecommunications, or DoT, has denied a request by the lobby group Cellular Operators Association of India (COAI) to let telecom operators exclude the money they earn by “porting” mobile numbers from their adjusted gross revenue (AGR), a part of which they pay the government, two DoT officials said.
India is expected to begin implementing the so-called mobile number portability (MNP) service in May to allow mobile phone users to “port”, or retain, their numbers when they change their telecom operator. The system will work by rerouting calls on these numbers from the original operator to the new one.
Two MNP service providers, Telcordia Technologies Inc. and Syniverse Technologies (India) Pvt. Ltd, will maintain a database of numbers that have shifted from one operator to another to allow for seamless rerouting of calls. Telcos can run their own databases of such numbers, or “dip” into each other’s or the MNP service providers’ databases.
Porting involves three kinds of transaction charges. Mobile phone users will pay the “porting charge”, fixed at Rs19, to the operator they are shifting to. Telcos will pay the “per port transaction charge” to MNP service providers for processing a porting request. They will also pay the “dipping charge” to another telco or to the MNP service providers if they utilize their query search databases.
COAI had said that porting and dipping charges that telcos receive will ultimately go to the MNP service provider’s kitty, and so should not be included in the adjusted gross revenues of telcos. Telcos pay 6-10% of their adjusted gross revenue as spectrum usage charge and 2-5% as licence fee to DoT.
“The telecom firms will not get to keep this money as it will go to the MNP operator. Then what is the logic of the money contributing to the AGR (adjusted gross revenue),” said T.R. Dua, officiating director general, COAI. “We had written to DoT asking them to clarify this.”
But a senior DoT official justified the decision to include the income in telcos’ revenue.
“They have the option of either having their own database or dipping into the MNP operator’s database. The operators who chose to dip will be bearing an acquisition cost. Why should this be written off as an expenditure and not included in the AGR?” said the official on condition of anonymity as he is not authorized to speak to the media.
Another DoT official confirmed the move. “The telcos will be going after higher Arpu (average revenue per user) generating consumers and, therefore, it is far more profitable for them when a subscriber comes to them. As per the licence agreement that they signed, it was agreed that all revenue would be added to the AGR,” he said.
India had 545.05 million wireless subscribers after adding 19.90 million in January, taking overall teledensity to 49.5%. The country has the fastest growing and second largest telecom market in the world after China.
The Telecom Regulatory Authority of India has estimated porting rate to be at 10% in the first 15 months, and 7%, 6% and 5%, respectively, over the next three years.
A Mumbai-based analyst, who did not want to be named, said porting could add Rs100 crore to telcos’ AGR every three months, assuming that 6-8% of India’s mobile subscriber base favoured a change of network in that period.
“The Indian market has 13 telecom operators, with around 95% of the market being prepaid. There is no other comparable market in the world,” the analyst said.
MNP has been delayed twice as operators were not ready to implement it. More recently, it has led to a tariff war, with each operator trying to expand its subscriber base to lessen the impact of users leaving its network once MNP is introduced. Telcos are expected to carry on the tariff war for at least six months after that,
But it has brought tariffs down to levels now viewed as unviable. “It all depends on how much their books can bleed, but the war will end with consolidation as the telcos will be easy targets for acquisition,” the Mumbai-based analyst said.
http://www.livemint.com/2010/03/14233000/DoT-not-to-exclude-portability.html
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3.
Lebanon to get additional internet bandwidth from India
BEIRUT: The Lebanese government is planning on buying an additional 45 gigabytes of international internet bandwidth for $45 million in the coming few months said an IT expert on Sunday.
“The Ministry of Telecommunications announced that the additional bandwidth is expected to reach Lebanon in the month of May but I think that this will not happen on time because of the difficulties encountered by the Lebanese government with the Egyptian intelligence service,” Riad Bahsoun told The Daily Star.
Bahsoun, who is the general manager of the Telecommunication Information Technology in Lebanon, explained that the new bandwidth will come from India via Egypt, through a submarine cable that will reach Tripoli. “There is no problem whatsoever with the cable but the only problem is with the whole system which is supposed to pass by Egypt before reaching Lebanon,” he said. “The Lebanese government did not solve the security issues with the Egyptian Intelligence; however Saudi Telecom is helping out with this issue.”
On the other hand, Danial Hamadeh, who is a senior spectrum expert at the Telecommunications Regulatory Authority (TRA), commented on Bahsoun’s remarks, saying that he does not believe a problem actually exists with the Egyptian intelligence service because a lot of Arab countries already receive bandwidth via Egypt gateway using IMEWE (India-Middle East-Western Europe).
Hamadeh explained that IMEWE submarine cable is an ultra high capacity fiber optic submarine cable system which links India and Europe via Middle East. He said that IMEWE is the international gateway and these cables serve as the principal internet connections between the Middle East and westward on to Europe and North America.
Lebanon has long suffered from a low speed broadband connectivity and this is negatively affecting the flow of investments to the country. Many foreign investors are reluctant to establish businesses in Lebanon due to the lack of proper internet connections and to the high-priced internet services which affect their production capacity.
One of the best examples in this area, according to Amer Tabsh, a professional technical adviser, is the lack of support offered by the government to Google Inc. in delivering their services from Lebanon.
“Google has offices all over the world, but if you dial their office numbers in Lebanon nobody answers since they were unable to place their servers in our country,” Tabsh told The Daily Star in a previous interview. Tabsh explained that their main servers are not available in Lebanon and the website address ‘www.google.com.lb’ operates from Jordan because of their low cost of internet services.
Bahsoun said that this step would be an extremely important milestone for Lebanon in terms of society transformation. “The entire society will migrate to an information society. You can have the best policy in the world but if you don’t have enough bandwidth then you have nothing,” he commented. “It will absolutely decrease internet services prices.”
Bahsoun said that this step will only be successful if the administration makes use of it in a good way. “They must establish a new system of bandwidth distribution to ISPs in addition to imposing on them new prices policies that are suitable with the demand of consumers,” he said.
Bahsoun said that Today 1 megabit of internet bandwidth is consumed by 40 users. “If the government receives this additional bandwidth then in 2012, we will be 12 users using 20 megabits of bandwidth and the fee per month will go down from $90 to $30,” he said.
Bahsoun explained that when a user subscribes to a 512kb connection, he is only using a fraction of it. “You only use a fraction which is 1 out of 40 because they sell the same fraction to 39 others since they don’t have enough bandwidth,” he said.
http://www.dailystar.com.lb/article.asp?edition_id=1&categ_id=3&article_id=112710
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4.
Stalement in RBI, competition panel talks over bank M&As
Banking regulator Reserve Bank of India’s (RBI) attempts to keep anti-competitive practices watchdog Competition Commission of India (CCI) out of the merger and acquisition (M&A) business of banks seems to have hit a roadblock. The ministry of corporate affairs said it is not agreeable exempting the banking industry from the M&A norms that are expected to be put in place by CCI soon.
Protracted discussions between the finance and corporate affairs ministries, the two administrative ministries for RBI and CCI, respectively, to exempt bank M&As from the regulatory purview of CCI have failed to produce results, it is learnt.
The RBI view has been that the CCI, which has to approve bank M&As under the provisions of the Competition Act 2002, should keep away from scrutinising such M&A activities because RBI is the regulator for the banking industry.
Under the Competition Act, any bank merger has to get final approval from the CCI, although RBI’s views will be sought on the matter. RBI had observed that CCI’s involvement in clearing bank M&As will go against the spirit of the regulatory powers given to the central bank. Apparent lack of sufficient expertise was another reason cited to keep M&A regulation in the banking sector confined to RBI.
Bank M&As were not part of the Monopoly and Restrictive Trade Practices Act (MRTPC) which gave way to the new Competition Act later.
“The matter is still under discussion,” a senior official of the ministry of corporate affairs said, though he did not indicate any possibility of an early solution. Sources said a final call on the issue will be taken by the ministers concerned - Finance Minister Pranab Mukherjee and Corporate Affairs Minister Salman Khurshid – on account of the little progress in ministry-level talks. The overlap of regulatory powers among sector regulators and the CCI has been generating differing views ever since the Competition Act was notified. Insurance and telecom are other sectors in which potential differences could arise since they have sector regulators in the Insurance Regulatory and Development Authority and the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India . CCI intervention is triggered only on those M&A deals above a certain deal size. Either the combined entity formed by the M&A should have a combined asset value of over Rs 1,000 crore or $500 million or
a turnover of Rs 3,000 crore or $1.5 billion.
http://www.business-standard.com/india/news/stalement-in-rbi-competition-panel-talks-over-bank-mas/388628/
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5.
Govt-appointed spl auditor gives clean chit to Bharti
New Delhi: The country’s largest telecom operator, Bharti Airtel said on Sunday that the government-appointed special auditor has given it a clean chit. The special audit was ordered by the department of telecommunications last year on the country’s top five telecom service providers to verify if the firms had underpaid licence and spectrum charges to the government.
Bharti’s statement comes in the backdrop of speculation in a section of industry that the audit report may have found some inconsistencies in the company’s reporting of subscriber numbers to DoT. Apparently, the company has sought to pre-empt any further speculation on the subject.
The audit report was submitted to the DoT last week.
In October 2009, a similar audit had found Anil Ambani-led Reliance Communications Ltd (RComm) inflating its 2007-08 wireless revenues by Rs 2,915 crore to shareholders, while simultaneously under-reporting the figures to telecom regulator Trai. It had found that RComm made an “under-payment of licence fee” of Rs 315.9 crore in 2006-07 and 2007-08, a charge denied by Rcomm later.
On Sunday a Bharti Airtel statement said the findings of the report has reconfirmed that all payments of licence fee and spectrum charges were as per laws.
“The findings of the special auditors appointed by the department of telecommunications has reconfirmed that all payments of license fee and spectrum charges are as per the license conditions as well as applicable rulings of the TDSAT. The audit has been conducted in a fair and transparent manner,” Manoj Kohli CEO & joint managing director of Bharti Airtel said.
“Bharti Airtel has always maintained the highest standards of corporate governance and has displayed highest regard for the regulatory compliance,” Kohli added. Kohli is now the CEO of the Bharti Airtel’s international business but was CEO India and South Asia for the period when the audit was conducted.
Bharti said the DoT had specifically indicated to the auditors to quantify the amount of licence fee even in those cases where TDSAT has ruled in favour of the industry.
“This audit is another testimony of Bharti Airtel’s professional management’s commitment and responsibility to its shareholders, government and regulatory bodies and is also a confirmation of the fact that Bharti Airtel always maintains highest standards of professional integrity by appointing best in the class statutory and internal auditors," Kohli said.
However, neither Bharti nor the DoT has released the findings of the audit report.
http://www.financialexpress.com/news/Govt-appointed-spl-auditor-gives-clean-chit-to-Bharti/590822/
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