Amid problems ailing the Indian telecom market, TRAI proposed steps to unbundle the current licensing regime but industry associations had mixed reactions to these recommendations. The Telecom Regulatory Authority of India on Thursday announced recommendations to the Department of Telecommunications to "unbundle" licensing by creating a new class of telecom entities called "access network providers". These recommendations were created to provide a broad framework for Virtual Network Operators (telecom operators who use leased infrastructure) seeking and entering into an agreement with the network providers. "Implementation of these recommendations are likely to result in increased sharing of network resources, reduction of cost, attract investment, strengthen the service delivery segment, and could also prove to be catalyst in proliferation of 5G services for Industry 4.0, enterprise segment and various other use cases, in a localized manner," TRAI said in its press release. These recommendations are more relevant in a competitive telecom market with several players, with different players having access to specific geographies. However, telecom in India is a far cry from this pre-2016 world now — there are just three telecom operators (one of whom is struggling to survive), and they have a significant amount of control over their networks end to end — outside of few specific contexts, VNOs are practically non-entities. While in theory, these rules seem to allow for more interoperability and an unbundled market in the middle mile of telecom networks, the fruits of such changes in the telecom license framework can only happen if the market…
