The Telecom Regulatory Authority of India, the country’s main communications regulator is clashing with the thousands of tiny analog cable suppliers in India, after calling for regulated price changes for providing digital set tops and upgrading the service. The clash perhaps shows an industry rife with corruption and piracy, and this week the TRAI has asked for the help of courts to get to the bottom of the matter.
In the upgrade to what it calls Digital Addressable Cable TV Systems (DAS) which has been going on since 2010, each cable TV operators needs to tell the supplier of its programming which bouquets are being received by each of its customers. The idea is that under a digital regime the provider of the programming and the TRAI are both entitled to subscriber data. One of the reasons for this is so that subscribers can buy set tops for the service without being forced to pay for them after the service is ended. TRAI has put out a payment regulation to ensure that consumers are not overcharged and has regulated digital set top pricing.
But it turns out that most cable operators will not report the data and TRAI is trying to get courts to force this through, since it is mandated by a new TV act.
The program providers also need the data to make sure they are being fully paid for their service provision.
TRAI refers to a set of standards for Quality of Service which provides for connection, disconnection, transfer, shifting of the cable TV services, procedures for handling subscriber complaints and for obtaining and moving set-tops and technical support, and what happens when bills are paid late.
The cable TV sector in India remains primarily analog and broken into tiny, localized businesses, with each operator sometimes supporting just a few streets and buying content centrally. The idea was for TRAI to find a basis for upgrading to digital and adding broadband addressability to the services, and close down analog services by December 2014. It is likely that the cable operators do not want to operate transparently or move away from analog, because they will have to pay more fees. Already TRAI has had to name a dozen cable operators to try to bring court pressure to bear.
The big problem is that in India larger and more professional organizations are running the DTH services which are expanding rapidly and overtaking what used to be around 75 million cable TV homes. In a way TRAI is trying to move those cables into the hands of companies that will develop broadband services on them, but our understanding is that if this is done without these upgrades, broadband cannot co-exist with non- addressable analog TV. Given that there are only 35 million telephone lines in India, and not all of these are capable of DSL broadband (due to their loop lengths) there is a server drag on fixed broadband capacity throughout India. A shift in the ownership or stance of cable operators after these upgrades go through could treble the number of broadband lines possible in India. At one stage TRAI suggested that the Unified Service Fund for telecoms should be used to upgrade cable, but this has never been implemented as far as we can see.
Another consideration is that TRAI is trying to ensure that the set tops of one operator are compatible with another, so that if a consumer buys a set top, they can opt to swap service to another provider ‘ another aspect of the new Act that Indian cable operators are unhappy with.
So TRAI has specified the devices and has offered a draft tariff order prescribing standard packages where a set top is also rented. This was loaded on the TRAI website on 11th April this year, for comments.
The continued disarray of cable in India is likely to lead to its user base shrinking in favor of a combination of DTH for TV delivery and LTE and HSUPA mobile for the bulk of internet access and a lost opportunity for fixed broadband in the home.