No licence needed for offering mobile VAS: TRAI
Companies such as OnMobile, ValueFirst and Hungama can breathe easy with the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India suggesting that value-added service (VAS) providers should be allowed to continue to function without having to take a licence.
However, the regulator has proposed that the Department of Telecom could collect a fee from those companies which offer VAS services based on short codes.
Growing VAS market
The VAS market in the country is rapidly growing. At present, operators earn 10-14 per cent of the total revenue from VAS. This is expected to cross 30 per cent of the mobile telecom service providers’ revenue in the next 5-7 years. SMS, ringtone and colour ring back tones constitute bulk of the value-added services being provided by the cellular operators.
“In order to give soft touch regulatory environment, the Authority has not recommended any separate category of licence or registration for value-added services. The DoT being the National Numbering Plan administrator may make appropriate arrangement for allocation of common short codes (CSCs), for specific service areas or on an all-India basis, for value-added services and also may evolve fee concept for such allocation of CSCs,” TRAI said in its release.
Provide fair access
TRAI also said that mobile operators need to provide fair access to their telecom infrastructure to independent content providers and maintain transparency in their management information system relating to value-added services for reconciliation.
“Mutual commercial agreements between telecom access service providers and content providers/ content aggregators for revenue share in the provisioning of value-added services remains the model,” the regulator said.
Source: TheHinduBusinessLine
