Firming up their rollout plans, the new telecom licensees will invest around $2 billion in the next four months for the rollout of their services.
New services will bring the IPL to mobile phone screens.
Telecom operators owe government a huge amount of Rs 17,980.77 crore in licence fee and spectrum charges, but the outstandings are under litigations, Parliament was informed on Wednesday.
Telecom shares rallied on hopes that they would hike tariffs after huge investments to acquire spectrum.
Bharti Airtel's fund raising is expected to strengthen its competitive positioning in the market and provide the telco with the necessary ammunition for aggressive 5G rollout, analysts said. The capital raising announcement, though unexpected and surprising, would enable Airtel to enhance its market share and provides it wherewithal to make faster investment in a scenario India moves to a two-player market earlier than expected, some analysts felt. Bharti Airtel's board on Sunday approved raising up to Rs 21,000 crore by way of rights issue at a price of Rs 535 per share.
Callers will soon be required to add '0' prefix for making calls from landlines to mobile phones in the country, with the telecom department asking telcos to make necessary arrangements by January 1 to implement the new system. The department has accepted sectoral regulator Trai's recommendation for having the '0' prefix for such calls, a move that will create sufficient numbering space for telecom services. The Department of Telecom (DoT) in a circular on `modification of dialling pattern from fixed line numbers to cellular mobile numbers' said in order to ensure adequate numbering resources for fixed line and mobile services, Trai's recommendations dated May 29, 2020 have been accepted by the Department.
Bharti Airtel, which acquired the African operations of Zain Telecommunications last year, had a net debt of $13.4 billion at the end of the first quarter of the current financial year.
A Vodafone Group insider with more than 25 years in the telco across geographies, he's like the eyes and ears of the multinational in India.
Recently, companies like Bharti airtel, Idea Cellular, Vodafone and Reliance Communications raised tariffs for their services by about 20 per cent in most operating circles.
As trade pundits predicted, tariff hikes are going to be slow and steady unlike the domino effect caused in 2009, when even established operators went into a frenzy and slashed tariffs to hold back subscribers.
This will enable security agencies to tap any call, real-time chat and data without help from the operators.
The government on Thursday warned telecom service providers of action if they failed to pass on the benefit of withdrawal of levy to consumers.
Adjusted gross revenue of telecom operator, earned from telecom services, declined by 2.67 per cent at Rs 34,527.50 crore (Rs 345.27 billion), while the gross revenue decreased by 0.15 per cent at Rs 52,858.39 crore (Rs 528.58 billion) on quarterly basis, the report said.
The licensee shall employ only Indian National as Chief Technical officer, Chief Information Security Officer, Nodal executives for handling interception and monitoring cases and System Administrators.
Trai asks telcos to add towers to address call drops.
Kapil Sibal, telecom minister, said many companies borrowed heavily to pay for 3G licences late last year. These companies were now facing difficulty in raising resources for the business, upsetting the calculations they had made while bidding aggressively for the licences, he said.
During a hearing before the Monopolies and Restrictive Trade Practices Commission (MRTPC) last month Bharti Airtel, Vodafone Essar, Reliance Communications, Tata Teleservices, and government-run BSNL and MTNL agreed to submit the undertaking.
Recently, world headlines buzzed with Elon Musk's announcement that he was shelving his audacious bid for social media platform Twitter. Away from the media spotlight, questions are being asked about the maverick billionaire's plans in India, too. A few days ago, a Reuters report said Musk's flagship Tesla had put on hold its plan to launch electric cars in India.
Though Google's investment is minuscule and will not move the needle, it will attract other investors to the company and be a morale booster. Pursuing Vodafone Idea would potentially pit Google against Facebook and an increasingly dominant Jio.
Top DoT sources said the department was unlikely to go for cancellation of licences, as many of the new operators already had made large investments and had a reasonable presence across the country.
While smart boys like the Ruias of Essar, Ajay Piramal, Max India promoter Analjit Singh laughed all the way to the bank, the Tatas, Anil Ambani, Malaysian tycoon T Ananda Krishna of Maxis (which invested in Aircel), Sistema, and Norway's Telenor burnt their fingers, notes Surajeet Das Gupta.
Complaint says Singapore Telecommunications sold services illegally in connivance with Bharti and Tata Communications.
The minister said the companies have given representation which is being examined by the DoT before taking a final decision.
Wipro Technologies has set up a separate group within its Telecom and Product Engineering practice to aggressively tap the opportunities in the telecom service providers' space.
Telecom operator Bharti Airtel on Monday announced 20-25 per cent tariff hikes for various prepaid offerings, including tariffed voice plans, unlimited voice bundles and data top-ups, and said the new rates will come into effect from November 26. The entry-level tariffed voice plan has been raised by about 25 per cent, while for unlimited voice bundles, the increase in most cases is about 20 per cent. Sunil Mittal led telco -- whose India mobile customer base stood at about 323 million at the last count -- has also increased the tariffs for data top-up plans by about 20-21 per cent
Finally, Trai has also said that spectrum can be shared between only two operators, not three.
DoT further clarified that since 2003 as many as 51 new licences were issued prior to January 2008 under the same guidelines on first come first served basis.
The price range of these mobile phones is between Rs 1,750 and Rs 7,000. After Bharti, others have followed the cue. Tata Indicom recently announced a QWERTY phone, which is a co-branded product with Alcatel.
Operators, including Tata Teleservices, have submitted the compliance report for messenger services to the department of telecommunications.
Idea, Reliance and BSNL have call drop rates in the range of 10 per cent or above.
A high-level meeting will be convened soon to decide on probing the India operations of Chinese Telecom companies -- 'Huawei' and 'ZTE' -- against the backdrop of the US calling the two firms a threat to American national security.
In June this year, Reliance agreed to merge its 50,000 telecom tower portfolio with GTL Infra in a cash-and-stock deal. Post merger, this would have been arguably the largest independent tower platform with an enterprise value of around $11billion.
Companies spend billions of dollars on building brands as it gives a strategic direction and competitive advantage.
Cellular operators across the country are working on a plan to set up a common mobile advertising exchange that will allow companies to advertise on mobile phones, based on their niche requirement of target audiences.
The Supreme Court on Thursday issued notices to telecom operator Bharti Airtel, GSM lobby COAI and private banks ICICI bank and American Express over unsolicited calls to mobile phones.
A large migrant population, better law and order situation made the state attractive.
Telecom companies are eyeing a piece of the market share where data usage generates a higher amount of revenue, once 3G services are launched later this year.
With BlackBerry makers passing on the buck to telecom operators for monitoring its services, the government has called a meeting of service providers this week to discuss the issue.
The new "combo vouchers" will enable customers to add value in their mobile phone account as well as avail services at discounted rates.
In July 2012, TDSAT gave split verdict where one of the bench member ruled in favour and other member ordered against it.
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