The Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI) on Wednesday held an open house discussion (OHD) on Consultation Paper on the ‘Framework for Service Authorisations to be Granted Under the Telecommunications Act, 2023’ where most of the stakeholders asked for removal of adjusted gross revenue (AGR) and licence fee, especially virtual network operators (VNOs).

The OHD revolved around various questions including – in the interest of ease of doing business, is there a need to replace the Affidavit to be submitted with quarterly payment of licence fee and spectrum usage charges (SUC) with a self certificate; and whether there is a need to review/ simplify the norms for the preparation of annual financial statements of the various service authorisations under Unified License (UL), (UL-VNO), and the Mobile Number Portability (MNP) licenses.

“Our AGR regime or revenue sharing regime is de facto taxation and there is really no reason why the two should co-exist...because this AGR is not applied uniformly across all sectors or players, there are all kinds of anomalies in our regime. For example, because of that the whole problem between the telcos and OTTs. One lot is under revenue share and the other is not,” said a stakeholder.

Currently, the government collects an AGR of eight per cent from the telcos including a five per cent Universal Service Obligation Levy.

Telcos-OTT spat

Meanwhile, there has been also a spat between telecom service providers (TSPs) and OTT players for years where TSPs have been asking for bringing the OTT players under the same licensing regime as such platforms primarily function at the application layer, relying on the underlying infrastructure and services provided by TSPs.

“In today’s open house discussion, we have received almost 360 degree type of inputs with their (stakeholders) own supporting arguments on the various aspects of the proposed authorisations framework, which have certainly given us better insight into the issues and will take into cognizance all the comments and counter comments that have been received and the arguments that have been put forward during the OHD,” Anil Kumar Lahoti, Chairman, TRAI, said.

After duly considering all these points, the sector regulator will frame its recommendations and give to the government, he said adding that stakeholders can send their final comments by August 27.

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