New
Delhi, May 31: The cabinet Thursday approved a new telecom policy that
seeks to do away with roaming charges across the country and simplifies
the licencing policy, Telecom Minister Kapil Sibal said Thursday.
"Affordability
of the consumers is the core of our policy," Sibal told reporters after
a cabinet meeting presided over by Prime Minister Manmohan Singh.
Sibal said the new policy aims at free roaming facility throughout the country.
The minister said the new policy seeks to provide a predictable and stable policy regime for a period of nearly 10 years.
The new policy called National Telecom Policy-2012 will replace more than a decade old legislation.
"The
policy envisions providing secure, reliable, affordable and high
quality converged telecommunication services anytime, anywhere for an
accelerated inclusive socio-economic development." according to an
official statement released after the cabinet meeting.
"The
main thrust of the Policy is on the multiplier effect and
transformational impact of such services on the overall economy," the
statement said.
The policy will be operationalised by bringing out detailed guidelines, as may be considered appropriate, from time to time.
It
will enable smooth implementation of the policies for providing an
efficient telecommunication infrastructure taking into account the
primary objective of maximising public good by empowering the people of
India, the statement said.
"The policy will further
enable taking suitable facilitatory measures to encourage existing
service providers to rapidly migrate to the new regime in a uniformly
liberalised environment with a level playing field," it said.
The
union cabinet also approved introduction of unified licence and
authorised the Department of Telecommunications to finalise the new
unified licensing regime with the approval of minister of communications
and IT.
The thrust areas of the New Telecom Policy-2012 are:
. Increase rural teledensity from the current level of around 39 to 70 by the year 2017 and 100 by the year 2020
. Repositioning of Mobile phone as an instrument of empowerment
. Broadband -"'Broadband For All" at a minimum download speed of 2 Mbps
. Domestic Manufacturing - Making India a global hub
. Convergence of Network, Services and Devices
. Liberalisation of Spectrum - any Service in any Technology
.
Simplification of Licensing regime - Unified Licensing, delinking of
Spectrum from License, Online real time submission and processing
. Consumer Focus - Achieve One Nation - Full Mobile Number Portability and work towards One Nation - Free Roaming
. Resale of Services
. Voice over Internet Protocol
. Cloud Computing, Next Generation Network including IPV6
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