The proposed Act would deal with all issues connected with wireless licences, including the terms and conditions. The terms and conditions would include reframing or withdrawal of allotted spectrum, pricing, cancellation or revocation of spectrum licence, exemptions on use of spectrum, its sharing and trading.

Legislative measures would be enacted to bring disputes between telecom consumers and service providers within the jurisdiction of the Consumer Protection Act.

The Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI) Act will reviewed with a view to addressing regulatory inadequacies and impediments.Also the Indian Telegraph Acts and its rules and other regulations would be reviewed to make them consistent with the new policy.

The recent multi-crore spectrum scam and the subsequent probe has landed a former minister, ex-officials, corporate functionaries in jail. Ministers are pointing fingers at each other.

The draft National Telecom Policy-2011 released on Monday by the Union Minister for Communications and Information Technology, Kapil Sibal has also proposed single licencing system across services and service areas and full mobile number portability with no extra charge on calls when out of one’s city or township, but within the country.

To facilitate faster roll-out of services, the policy has proposed delinking of the licensing of networks from the delivery of services to the end users. Also delinking spectrum allocation in respect of all future licences. Spectrum should be made available at price through market-related processes.

This draft policy is the last in the triad of policies to drive a National Agenda for ICTE. The two such policies released earlier were on electronics and information technology. All these three policies will be sent to the Union Cabinet for approval.

The draft policy on telecom has envisaged affordable, reliable and secure telecommunication and broadband services across the country. It has proposed affordable and reliable broadband on demand by 2015 and to achieve 175 million broadband connections by 2017 and 600 million by 2020 at minimum 2 Mbps download speed and making available higher speeds of at least 100 Mbps on demand.

Otherwise the existing broadband download speed of 256 Kbps would be revised to 512 Kbps and subsequently to 2 Mbps by 2015 and higher speeds of at least 100 Mbps thereafter.

Additional 300 MHz spectrum for IMT services will be made available by 2017 and another 200 MHz by 2020. The policy suggested to achieve substantial transition to new Internet Protocol (IPv 6) in the country in phased and time bound manner by 2020 and encourage an ecosystem for provision of a significantly large bouquet of services on IP platform.

The new draft policy has sought to increase rural teledensity from the current level of around 35 to 60 by the year 2017 and to 100 by 2020. It has proposed to provide high speed and high quality broadband access to all village panchayats through optical fibre by the year 2014 and progressively to all villages and habitations.

The draft has proposed Fibre to The Home (FTTH) by independent Infrastructure Providers (IPs) with enabling guidelines and policies, favouring fast transformation of cities and towns into `always connected’ society.

Delivery of seamless voice, data, multimedia and broadcasting services on converged networks will be ensured for enhanced service delivery to provide superior experience to users. The role of new technologies in furthering public welfare and enhanced customer choices through affordable access and efficient service delivery will be recognized. The emergence of new service formats such as Machine-to-Machine (M2M) communications like remotely operated irrigation pumps, smart grids, represent tremendous opportunities as their roll-out becomes more widespready, the draft policy said.

The draft policy suggested declaring telecom as an infrastructure project. It suggested developing Brand India by creating a corpus to promote indigenous R&D, IPR creation, entrepreneurship, manufacturing, valued added services, commercializing and deployment of state-of-the-art telecom products and services during the 12th Plan period.

It has proposed 80% telecom sector demand through domestic manufacturing with a value addition of 65% by 2020.