Telecos Pushing For OTT to Pay

The battle between Telecom companies and OTT platforms is intensifying, and practically, there is no sign of slowing down. Now, the companies are demanding that a share of the contribution from the Over-the-top players won’t violate the sense of net neutrality.

The Cellular Operators Association of India (COAI), which represents telecom companies like Vodafone, Reliance Jio, and Bharti Airtel, believes that if large over-the-top (OTT) players pay a fair-share fee to telecom operators, it will improve the quality of networks for consumers.

They argue that this doesn’t go against net neutrality principles. COAI’s statement is a response to the Broadband India Forum (BIF), which includes companies like Netflix, Amazon, and Disney Hotstar, claiming that requiring OTT players to pay for network usage and imposing telecom regulations on them would violate net neutrality rules established in 2016.

Telecom companies want OTT services like WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, Google Meet, and Telegram to follow the same rules as they do when it comes to providing communication services. They want to maintain the essence of ‘same service, same rules.’

Now, the OTT platforms are completely dependent on the services of the telecom providers, and this emerges as the basic argument for the claim. But also, in the case of 5G, the installation and management are a lot costlier than that of 4G.

So, with contributions from the OTT platforms, they can make it easily accessible and cheap for the masses, a win-win for both parties.