BSNL favours the interconnectivity through a Central Gateway. But BSNL is in favour of Level-1 TAX of PSTN as Gateway and not any other Switch as Gateway. There is no doubt that resource-wise, interconnectivity through Gateway will be more economical. However, from a technical point of view this Gateway, which will form a hub to transit and switch calls to other operators may eventually become a bottleneck. In case this Gateway Switch fails the whole operation of mobile network of all operators would come to a grinding halt. In case of direct connectivity, if one link fails it will lead to failure of communication between only two operators whereas with others it will continue. In contrast, however, in the case of connectivity through a Gateway Switch if one media connecting operator to gateway fails, his network would be completely out of communication with rest of the network. However redundancy is generally built into the telecommunication network at the planning stages to take care of such situations. In any case TRAI has still not come out with a recommendation and will take time and, therefore, we feel that till such time the matter is comprehensively dealt with by TRAI and final decision is taken thereon by the licensor, direct connectivity should remain permissible.
