Upping the ante against Reliance Infocomm, cellular operators on Wednesday shot off a letter to the government, in which they said a company could not claim huge investments as a justification for not restricting the scope of its wireless-in-local-loop limited mobility services.
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Though the cellular operators did not name the company, they said a single basic services operator was blatantly violating the licence condition for WLL services.
"These investment claims of Rs 15,000 crore (Rs 150 billion) by the fixed service provider have been considerably overstated. There is no way to ascertain the accuracy of these claims," a letter, jointly signed by Bharti's Sunil Mittal, BPL Mobile's Rajeev Chandrashekhar, Spice Corp's Dilip Modi, Escotel's Rajan Swaroop, Hutch Essar's Ravi Ruia and RPG Group's Vinay Aggarwal, said.
"It is our estimation that the affected investments quantum are insignificant and will lie between Rs 350-500 crore (Rs 3.50-5 billion) most of which can be salvaged through international resale," the letter, sent to senior government officials in the communications and prime minister's office, added.
However, Reliance officials strongly refuted the charges made by the cellular operators. "If we have invested only Rs 500 crore to support 4 million subscribers then by that logic they would have invested only about Rs 2,000 crore (Rs 20 billion) to support 20 million subscribers. Why are they claiming to have invested Rs 25,000 crore (Rs 250 billion). Reliance has over 78 base stations across 18 circles which requires much more than Rs 500 crore," a senior Reliance official said.
The cell firms said they had invested more than Rs 25,000 crore and it was highly inappropriate for anybody to use the excuse of investments to justify non-implementation of the Telecom Dispute Settlement and Appellate Tribunal order on limited mobility.
On August 8, TDSAT had asked the government to look at ways to create a differentiation between cellular and WLL services, which included restricting the scope of services within the short distance charging area.
The Telecom Regulatory Authority of India had also asked the government to ban call forwarding services being offered by Reliance Infocomm as it was being used to offer roaming type facility.
Meanwhile, Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajapyee is understood to have approved the formation of a group of ministers to look into various issues in the telecom sector, including the long-standing dispute between basic and cellular operators over limited mobility telephony.
The GoM will be headed by Finance Minister Jaswant Singh, highly-placed sources said, adding that other ministers in the group include Communication Minister Arun Shourie, I&B Minister Ravi Shankar Prasad, Defence Minister George Fernandes, Law Minister Arun Jaitley, and External Affairs Minister Yashwant Sinha.
Sources said the prime minister has given his approval for the constitution of GoM for which a notification would be issued soon. The terms of reference of the group were not immediately known.
