TRAI issues Supplementary Consultation Paper on roadmap to enhance broadband speed

The Telecom Regulatory Authority of India had been requested by DoT seeking consolidated and updated recommendations in regard to proliferation of Fixed-line Broadband Services in the country, on March 12, 2021.

The department has raised certain new issues like exemption of the license fee on the revenues earned from fixed line broadband keeping in view the current factual matrix and relevant issues, likelihood of misuse by the licensees through misappropriation of revenues due to the proposed exemption of the License Fee on the revenues earned from Fixed-line Broadband services, and promoting proliferation of fixed-line broadband by providing direct benefit to consumers for usage of fixed-line Broadband services.

Since these issues were neither explicitly consulted with the stakeholders in the Consultation Paper on ‘Delivering Broadband Quickly: What do we need to do?’ dated April 17, 2015 nor in the CP on ‘Roadmap to Promote Broadband Connectivity and Enhanced Broadband Speed’ dated August 20, 2020, the Authority has decided to issue a supplementary CP on the above issues to provide its consolidated and updated recommendations for proliferation of fixed line broadband services after following the due consultation process.

Further, while in the CP dated August 20 2020, the issues relating to cross-sector collaboration for infrastructure creation and sharing, use of electric poles for aerial fibre installation, RoW permissions for erection of telecom infrastructure, and sharing of electric poles for hosting 5G small cells infrastructure have been discussed at length, the explicit reference to use of Street Furniture for rollout of 5G networks was not there. Accordingly, a section on this issue has also been added in Chapter-II of this supplementary CP.

Written comments are invited by June 3, 2021 and counter comments by June 10, 2021.
CT Bureau