3G guidelines to be rolled out in June 2008: A Raja

New Delhi: The ministry of communication and IT will roll out the much awaited 3G guidelines in June 2008 to enhance mobile phone standards for 100 per cent teledensity and extension of broadband facilities not only in urban India but also its rural part as scheduled by 2010, telecom and IT minister A Raja said today.

Inaugurating Assocahm's two-day Global Telecom Summit, which begun in the capitol today, Raja said that his ministry was currently deeply engaged in preparing detailed guidelines that would lay out a time schedule for execution of 3G technologies well within the domain of UPA regime.

Before the guidelines are rolled out, the minister said he would meet the prime minister to take his guidance on the issue as the ministry of communication and IT is totally serious to execute its e-governance programme to connect rural population with broadband internet and all advance facilities by improving its telecom network.

According to the minister, the broadband facilities would be extended faster as soon as the 3G guidelines are rolled out to every college, school, panchayat, district and bloc levels and finally to about 650,000 villages across the country.

With the guidelines being made public, the controversy relating to spectrum allocation would also come to an end, the minister said, calling all the telecom service providers present in the conference to adopt a collaborative approach with each other for benefit of the end-users.

According to him, the rural teledensity was less than 10 per cent "despite the telecom revolution" against the urban teledensity of 65 per cent, which needed to be "enhanced on war footing". He said the government proposed to extend broadband connectivity to 3 billion people in the rural areas by 2008-09 and finally to the entire village population by 2010.

In a bid to connect the rural population with advance telecom facilities, the government would extend subsidies on instruments and channels that connect the rural population with broadband facilities, though the minister did not elaborate what the element of subsidy would be.

The USO fund would also be utilised for not only providing telephone and mobile connection to rural India but also players that help telephony reach the countryside, said the minister.

According to Siddharth Behura, secretary, department of communication & IT, the department of telecom was committed to honour all its commitment announced up to 2010 as the information and telecom ministry has already taken policy initiatives for them.

A few more policy decisions needed to be further initiated and with the roll out of 3G guidelines, the telecom industry would further witnessed a second generation revolution to ensure easy and much more competitive access to telephony, said Behura.