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Giving
spectrum preference to new players over incumbents will lead
to increasingly fragmented spectrum allocation, which might
result in a long-term spectrum crisis. Indian
telecom industry is the fourth largest market in Asia after
China, Japan and South Korea. Telecom network is the eighth
largest in the world and the second largest among emerging
economies. Currently, the sector revenue to GDP is 2.1% as
compared with over 2.8% in developed economies. The country
adds nearly eight million mobile phone users each month. The
mobile operators are targeting relatively untapped rural areas
and small towns for their future expansion.
Over the years,
the sector has undergone a major process of transformation
through policy reforms. The policy initiatives and participation
of private players resulted in better quality and lower tariffs.
Though India attained the status of world's one of the biggest
telecom providers, the quality of mobile lines still depicts
a gloomy picture. Despite
massive investments over the past decade, the sector is still
struggling with inadequate infrastructure, which is resulting
in poor voice quality, dropped calls, undelivered messages,
and at the end harassed customers. Moreover, mobile operators
are paying more attention on to increase their customer base
than improving the network performance.
As a result, most
of the mobile operators have fallen short on their performance
parameters like network quality, billing, customer care and
value-added services. At the same time, the players are unwilling
to be blamed for their customers' unhappiness. According to
them, telecom customers are unhappy, not because of telecom
companies have not been paying enough attention to their network
performance but country's unbalanced spectrum (the radio frequencies
that enable mobile communications) allocation policies and
messy planning have acted as drawbacks to wireless telecom
services. |
