COAI defends call for mobile tariff hike, cites rising network costs, OTT traffic

New Delhi: Telecom industry body COAI has defended service providers’ call to increase mobile tariff, citing the continuous widening of the gap between their expenses on network deployment and the revenue earned by them in return.

While speaking at India Mobile Congress, Cellular Operators Association of India (COAI), Director General, SP Kochhar told PTI that the government has supported a lot to telecom operators with policies like right of way (RoW), but still several authorities continue to charge exorbitant fees for laying network elements.

“Earlier, the gap until 2024 for infrastructure development and revenue received from tariffs was around Rs 10,000 crore. Now it has started increasing even further. Our cost of rolling out networks should be reduced by a reduction in the price of spectrum, levies, etc.

Also Read

India poised to lead global race towards 6G: COAI

“The Centre has come out with a very good ROW policy. It is a different matter that many people have not yet fallen in line and are still charging extremely high,” Kochhar said.

He defended the cut down of data packs in entry-level tariff plans by select operators.

Kochhar said that there is stiff competition among the four telecom operators, and there has been no special trend to show that consumers are migrating to low-cost data options.

“There is a need to find ways to make high network users pay more for the data. Seventy percent of the traffic which flows on our networks is by 4 to 5 LTGs (large traffic generators like YouTube, Netflix, Facebook etc). They pay zero. Nobody will blame OTT, but they will blame the network. Our demand to the government is that they (LTGs should contribute to the development of networks,” Kochhar said.

He said that the investment made by Indian telecom operators is for Indian consumers and not meant as a medium for the profit of international players without bearing any cost.

Get the latest updates in Hyderabad City News, Technology, Entertainment, Sports, Politics and Top Stories on WhatsApp & Telegram by subscribing to our channels. You can also download our app for Android and iOS.