Pradip Baijal, previous chairman of the TRAI (Telecom Regulatory Authority of India),has supported the new guidelines on SMP (significant market power) and predatory pricing, debating that the current authority had taken into consideration future techs in which all suppliers were now spending, and was consequently shifting with the altering times.
Backing the opinions of TRAI and countering Rahul Khullar, one more previous regulator who was the telecom controller between 2003 and 2006, Bijal claimed that tariffs were certainly below the purview of sectoral watchdog, and that an order from Supreme Court had approved the claim of the regulator. Khullar had claimed that predatory tariffs were majorly the domain of the CCI (Competition Commission of India).
“The type of telephony has altered considerably and there are many techs that are being employed including new and old, and therefore TRAI has made a decision that the old order for tariff must be revised,” Baijal claimed to the media. “As a controller, TRAI will only do what it believes is in the interest of the consumer,” he claimed.
Baijal debated that the watchdog kept only parameters of revenue share and subscribers, and eliminated factors of volume of traffic and network capacity that were made for older techs that backed only voice. In case of new tech that can convey video, data, and voice in addition to other things, which will need more capacity, the old rules will not be enough, he claimed.
Previous month, TRAI had made a fresh formula to verify predatory pricing and altered the meaning of SMP, offering costing suppleness only to providers with less than 30% of the market’s users or income, scrapping network capacity or volume of traffic as criterion. It further claimed that predatory costing will be decided on average variable cost of a carrier and that telecom companies can’t provide pricing bundles to separate users to keep hold of them without providing all users the similar tariff plan.