With a lot of service providers in India complaining about the clauses in the Unified Telecom Licencing that the Department of telecom has proposed, the body has now made some amends to the regulation.
The Department of Telecom has amended the Unified Telecom Licence regulation and has removed the clause which required operators to compulsorily migrate to the new regime. The initial regulations mandated operators to migrate all their telecom licences to the new regime on expiry of one in any of their circles. This was termed as forced migration by the service providers and they had expressed their unhappiness over the regulation.
With the amendment of the regulation, the above mentioned clause now reads as “In order to ensure that the UL (unified licence) regime covers all existing licences, a migration path if offered to the existing licences to migrate to UL regime. Licences of any of the existing Telecom Services Provider shall be eligible to migrate to UL with any number of additional services.”
With the initial regulation, service providers Airtel and Vodafone would be forced to shift all their existing permits to the new regime when some of their licences expire in the last quarter of 2014. However with the amendment, the service providers need to shift only the expiring permits to the new regime during renewal. Every operator is required to pay a one-time non-refundable entry fee of Rs. 15 crore to obtain the new unified licences.
