Cable firms have potential to increase internet connectivity: Trai chairman

Providing internet services through cable firms has huge potential to increase connectivity across the country but the proposal is on hold because of some taxation and licence issues, Trai chairman R S Sharma said today.
“Trai has given recommendation in this regard to Department of Telecom and Ministry of Information and Broadcasting but because of some taxation issues this whole thing has not been done,” Sharma said at an event organised by Cuts International.
He said that there are issues around revenue definition in the telecom sector.
Sharma added there are also some licence issues as cable firms fall under the I&B Ministry, while internet bandwidth is the domain of the Telecom Ministry.
“Some policy intervention is required in this matter,” Sharma said.
As part of consumer protection measures, the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (Trai) is also working to determine the amount of data that gets downloaded by mobile applications automatically without the subscribers’ knowledge.
“In the backdrop, there is so much of pushing of data by mobile applications. We are working on the issue of automatic pushing of data download.
“We are getting IIT Hyderabad involved in to it to learn as to how much data is downloaded unknowingly. Hopefully the report will come out in a month,” Trai Principal Advisor U K Srivastava said.