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Polity & Governance
Mahesh

27/06/24 05:55 AM IST

The Telecommunications Act, 2023

In News
  • Recently,multiple sections of the Telecommunications Act, 2023 will come into effect, giving way to what is the first piece of the larger technology legislative puzzle to fall into place. 
Provisions of the act
  • Sections 1, 2, 10 to 30, 42 to 44, 46, 47, 50 to 58, 61 and 62 of the Act will go into effect.
  • These sections include the entire chapter on right of way reforms (they bring in a state government-led dispute resolution structure, where state bureaucracy can decide right of way issues that are related to permits for telecom network roll out), standards, public safety, national security and protection of telecommunication networks, Digital Bharat Nidhi (a replacement of the erstwhile Universal Service Obligation Fund), innovation and technology development, protection of users, offences and certain miscellaneous sections.
  • Other provisions, like the suspension and interception of telecommunication services, which go into effect under the Act, have been in place under the older laws as well.
  • Creating sandboxes for innovation — meaning building a controlled environment in which organisations can test and experiment with new technologies and ideas without the risk of failure — is a new provision which will come into force.
  • The Act envisions the creation of a live testing environment where new products, services, processes and business models may be deployed, on a limited set of users, for a specified period of time, with certain relaxations.
  • Others related to duties of users, criminalisation of certain acts such as tampering with telecom identifiers, and creation of regulatory sandboxes are new.
  • The Telecommunications Bill, 2023 has opened the door for administrative allocation of spectrum for satellite broadband services, with India set to follow the global norm in how such a spectrum is assigned to entities.
  • This could be a big win for Bharti Airtel’s OneWeb, Elon Musk’s Starlink, and Amazon’s Kuiper.
  • The assignment of the spectrum – whether through an auction or administrative means – for satellite communications was at the heart of a debate between the government and a divided industry, with the telecom department even asking the telecom regulator TRAI for modalities around auctioning satellite spectrum.
Source- Indian Express

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