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TRAI proposals on CPP regime likely by Dec

Our Bureau

BANGALORE, Aug. 28

THE Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI) hopes to come out with its recommendations on the `Calling Party Pays' (CPP) issue for the mobile phone service by December after completing its rounds of `open house' meetings in five major cities.

It held its first meeting here on Tuesday where several questions relating to CPP were discussed between TRAI and representatives of cellular phone service operators and consumer protection organisations. TRAI will hold its next session on September 4 in Mumbai, which will be followed by Chennai, Kolkata and Delhi.

An attempt to introduce CPP in 1999 had failed when an earlier TRAI notification had been challenged in a court questioning its authority to implement the regime. Subsequently, suitable amendments made in the TRAI Act and also vast changes in the telecom policies resulting in new perspectives of the business, essentially due to migration from the licensing to revenue-sharing policy, has prompted TRAI to reconsider the introduction of CPP.

Talking to newspersons at the end of the `open house' which discussed the consultation paper on issues relating to the introduction of CPP, Mr M.S. Verma, Chairperson of TRAI, said that the meeting discussed certain fundamental issues, including the ques tion whether an intervention by a regulatory agency was necessary or should it be left to the market forces or to self-regulation by the industry itself.

Several views were expressed, but a near-consensus was manifest in the meeting with the representatives of the service operators justifying the need for CPP for a hassle-free growth of the business. AirTel, Bharti Mobile's brand of mobile service, and Sp ice Telecom, two operators of the service in Karnataka, and BPL, a leading operator of the service in Maharashtra, Kerala and Tamil Nadu, argued for the introduction of the CPP as an incentive for increasing the usage of mobile service. Also, a few consu mer protection organisations' representatives endorsed the view.

Mr Verma said TRAI will be taking up other issues like international long-distance (ILD) phone service, voice over Internet protocol and tariff rebalancing for both ILD and domestic long-distance service.