At a meeting with the chief of TRAI this week, telecom firms including Reliance Jio, Bharti Airtel, and Vodafone Idea urged strongly for the regulation of communication OTT providers.

A discussion with telecom operators and internet service providers was organized by the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India to set the agenda for 2023, during which time participants brought up a number of concerns.

The planned revision of Quality of Service (QoS) standards and laws regarding bothersome calls was another topic on which TRAI updated operators during the meeting (Unsolicited Commercial Communication).

This week, meetings were attended by Mahendra Nahata, a board member for Reliance Jio, Vodafone Idea's P Balaji, the CEO of Airtel, and P Balaji, the chief regulatory and corporate affairs officer. Director of TRAI PD Vaghela presided over the meeting.

All of the telecom firms argued in favor of "same service, same rules," claiming that OTT players should be subject to the same regulations as telcos because they provide comparable services.

The sector has long called for a level playing field with communications OTTs, stressing that licensing requirements and player treatment must be made uniformly applicable for players in comparable positions.

In order to promote ‘fair and healthy’ competition in the market, industry group Cellular Operators Association of India has also emphasized the importance of ensuring a level playing field for all technologies, i.e. same service-same rules with respect to OTT communication services.

In fact, the telecom operators' group had even argued in favor of a license and light-touch regulatory framework for such services late last year, pushing for OTT communication providers to directly pay telcos for the data traffic they are generating onto the networks.

Last year, COAI Director General SP Kochhar stated that the association had provided its recommendations for how OTT communication services should be classified as part of the draft telecom bill to guarantee there was no ambiguity.

Applications like WhatsApp, Signal, Google Meet, Telegram, and others provide OTT communication services.

On the other hand, telecom players requested a reduction in taxes, such as the license cost, during their meeting with TRAI this week.