The Telecom Regulatory Authority of India has decided to allow telecom service providers the flexibility to fix their own tariffs for another month.

This is the third time such an extension has been granted. Trai, which had not as yet finalised the revised guidelines for the interconnect usage charges regime, had in May allowed operators this flexibility for an initial three-month period. It later extended it by another month in August.

"The IUC review exercise is still on and it is likely to take some more time before a new IUC regime is specified. In view of this, the authority has decided to further extend the period of flexibility to service providers to implement self-checked tariff packages for a period of another month," Trai said, explaining the rationale for the extension, in a note to operators.

However, Trai said operators, while announcing the tariffs, must comply with the existing IUC norms announced on April 30, 2003.

"The regulatory principles as enunciated shall continue to be adhered to by all the service providers while implementing the self-checked tariff packages," Trai said in its letter.

Trai had raised questions over some of the tariff proposals filed by telecom service providers including Reliance Infocomm and Tata Teleservices.

National long distance tariffs being offered by cellular operators like Bharti, Hutchison-Essar  and the Birla-Tata-AT&T combine had also come under scrutiny.

When telecom industry players later demanded a review of the tariff norms, Trai allowed operators to continue with their packages on the condition that they would abide by the revenue-sharing guidelines.

Recently, the parliamentary standing committee on information technology and telecom had asked the regulator to explain a number of issues including the rationale for imposing additional access deficit charges.

Basic firms demand freeze on spectrum allocation

Private basic operators today said cellular operators had made inefficient use of available spectrum by deploying the global system for mobile technology to offer mobile telephony services, instead of the higher capacity code division multiple access technology.

Basic operators also said the government should freeze fresh allocation of spectrum and withdraw the spectrum that has been used inefficiently by cell firms.

Cellular operators, on the other hand, said as CDMA had more capacity, basic operators using the technology for offering wireless-in-local-loop limited mobility services, should be asked to pay more entry fee.