New Delhi, February 14
In a bid to entangle the telecom muddle, the Union Communication and IT Minister, Mr Arun Shourie, today constituted a seven-member committee, including Reliance’s Mukesh Ambani and Bharti’s Sunil Mittal, to look into various issues relating to WLL (limited mobile) services and resolve the row between the cellular and basic operators.
“The Group will finish its work in two weeks and we are meeting again on March 1 to take stock of the situation. They will decide by Tuesday the issues which need to be deliberated,” Mr Shourie told reporters after a seven-hour-long meeting. This is the first meeting with industry leaders after taking charge as Communications Minister recently.
The committee comprising Telecom Commission Chairman Vinod Vaish will go into three main issues, one of which is how to ensure that the mobility under WLL services remains limited as per the licence, an issue on which the two segments in the telecom sector have been clashing for the past two years.
The group will also look into the issue of Level Playing Field to see if the field was uneven for one type of service providers and also identify competitive safeguards required in the industry for future.
Mr Ambani said the group, comprising representatives from the public and private sector as well as government officials, would “deliver value.”
Other members of the group are Rajeev Chandrasekhar (BPL), Prithipal Singh (BSNL), S Ramakrishnan (Tata Teleservices) and Prakash Bajpai (Reliance).
On the contentious issue of roaming on WLL phones, Mr Ambani said: “Reliance is committed to stick to licence conditions. Our services are limited mobility and we will have multiple registration system. And, they are well within the licence conditions.”
He said the subscribers travelling to other cities having Reliance’s network would be given a separate number and all calls would be forwarded to the new number.
Illustrating the Multiple Registration System (MRS) he said “if a Reliance consumer travels from Delhi to Jalandhar, he will be given a separate number in Punjab and there the phone will be working only in the SDCA. And this valid service”.
