Government to fix uniform licence fee for telcos

The government will soon announce a uniform single licence fee for telecom service providers in the country in order to reduce arbitrage.

"We have agreed on the rationalisation of licence fee. It should be one uniform licence fee which will be announced shortly," telecom secretary Siddharth Behura said at function organised by the Internet Providers Association of India (ISPAI).

Telecom licence fee currently varies between 6 and 10 per cent of the revenue of these companies, depending upon the type of service and the circle they operate.

Telecom operators with multiple licences can take advantage of the fee differential to show higher revenues under the licence with lower revenue share to evade higher licence fee.

"This would reduce arbitrage across the board when you have one uniform licence fee in the telecom sector," Bahuria said.

He, however, did not divulge the percentage for fixing the fee. The move follows special audit of all integrated telecom players like Bharti Airtel, Reliance Communications, Vodafone Essar and Tata Teleservices.

Bahuria said the department of telecom might also consider delinking licences and spectrum charges as suggested by an internal committee of the DoT. Currently, Unified access licences come bundled up with 4.4 Mhz of spectrum at a licence fee of Rs1,651 crore.

"The spectrum issue has also been referred again to TRAI in a different context and the committee of Subodh Kumar has also suggested that the spectrum should be delinked from the UAS licence for all times to come. So, considering this I do not think there would be much difficulty solving these two issues," Behura said.