Telecom Dispute Settlement Appellate Tribunal on Saturday pulled up the government for its inaction to stop wireless-in-local-loop service providers from giving mobile facility beyond their territory, and said distinction between cellular services and limited mobile services had to be there despite the advent of technology.

The TDSAT, in a majority judgement, reiterated the guidelines, which said basic service operators could provide WLL service on a mobile handheld set but with condition that their range would not exceed the local call area.

The majority judgement, given by members R U S Prasad and P R Dasgupta, said that though there was no bar on WLL service providers to use new technology but the same could not be a plea for exceeding the local coverage area.

Referring to the "studied silence" of the government on the action to prohibit the WLL service providers from exceeding their allotted coverage area through mobile phones, it said the government merely had said that this misuse could be stopped in several ways.

"This is an unsatisfactory situation. We would like Union of India to go carefully into the issue of technology to ensure that neutrality of technology is not used as a subterfuge for poaching on each other's license territory," it said.

However, the minority judgement by Tribunal chairman Justice D P Wadhwa said Mobile Switching Centre was not a new technology development and was used by basic operators for providing WLL (fixed) services even before January 2001.

The majority judgement observed that the government may also consider setting up a task force consisting of independent technical experts regarding modalities for restricting limited mobility to local call area on WLL platform and enforcing all other parameters laid down by the licensor in its earlier guidelines.

The TDSAT suggested that the experts for the task force could be drawn from Indian Institute of Technology and Council for Scientific and Industrial Research and said the Telecom Regulatory Authority should also be involved in this process and the exercise should be completed within two months.