After Sunil Mittal showing the way of success in Indian Telecom industry, everybody wants to be a Telecom Service Provider. First it was Real Estate major Parsvnath Developers which applied for a Telecom license. Unitech Ltd and DLF followed it and now India’s most speculative company IndiaBulls also wants to be a Telco. The Department of Telecommunications (DoT) is looking at allowing two or three more pan-India telecom operators on stricter entry criteria as part of the new guidelines for allocation of Universal Access Service Licence (UASL).
Don’t forget Telecom is a capital intensive business. Indian Telecom License maybe cheap but Spectrum will be really expensive this time as auction will be the only solution for this scarce resource. Bharti-Airtel and Vodafone Essar are the biggest beneficiaries since they already own majority of the spectrum. New entrants will bleed heavily as they will have high entry cost and competing with established players won’t be an easy task.
In a separate development, Telecom regulator TRAI will soon come out with recommendations to address issues like numbering plan, interconnection and common exchange to facilitate the migration of mobile operators to Next Generation Networks.
