During the last decade, the telecom industry in India has grown tremendously, both in terms of penetration as well as connectivity. Today, India is one of the fastest growing information and communication technologies markets in the world, fuelled largely by the cellular mobile revolution. Starting from a few million connections in 1997, we now have more than a billion connections, with 97.5% of them being wireless subscribers. With this, the overall teledensity in India at the end of 2015 stood at 81.83%.

India has also witnessed tremendous growth in terms of the total number of Internet users. At the end of December 2015, we had over 331 million Internet subscribers in the country, of which about 94% (over 311 million) were wireless Internet users.1 The current nature of telecommunications and internet access services in India is therefore largely wireless.

The number of broadband users has also been increasing steadily over the years. At present, India has approximately 136.5 million broadband subscribers, a figure that is expected to rise significantly in the coming years, particularly in light of the Government's ‘Digital India’ initiative. This initiative emphasizes the electronic delivery of services to all citizens as an urgent national priority, with ‘Broadband for All’ as one of its fundamental pillars. Providing broadband to all will require a significant expansion of service providers’ networks, with substantial investments in infrastructure development.

Access to information and communication technologies has helped fuel the rapid growth of the Indian economy. Increased connectivity to the Internet has increased consumer welfare, through better information dissemination, increased access to markets, growth of social networks, and proliferation of online media and content. It has also resulted in the creation of a new class of service providers that offer services through the Internet, employing new and innovative business models.

The growth in the number of Internet users and rise in Internet traffic has also led Telecommunication Service Providers (TSPs) to seek innovative solutions. While TSPs must cater to the increasing demand by increasing the investment in network infrastructure, they could also use traffic management tools to deal with problems of congestion on the network. This has resulted in new debates about the appropriateness of the tools and policies that may be used by TSPs for traffic management and the potential for abuse by TSPs for discriminatory or anti-competitive purposes.

DoT has sought the recommendations of TRAI on the subject of net neutrality, including traffic management techniques; the economic, security and privacy aspects of OTT services; and other relevant areas covered in TRAI’s consultation paper dated 27th March 2015.

This pre-consultation paper is an attempt to identify the relevant issues in these areas, which will help TRAI in formulating its views on the way forward for policy or regulatory interventions.

Consultation Paper on Net Neutrality

The last date for sending your suggestions is 21st June, 2016.