TRAI recommends amendments in licensing conditions to make Set top box interoperability mandatory

Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI) has recommended that all DTH and cable Set-top-boxes (STBs) provided to the customers must support interoperability and the Ministry of Information and Broadcasting should make requisite amendments in licensing and registrations conditions or the Cable Act to make it mandatory. The regulator has even gone a step further to recommend mandatory availability of USB port based Common Interface in all Digital TVs sets.

Through Interoperability, the same STB can be used interchangeably across different DTH or Cable TV Networks. Currently, STBs deployed by cable networks are non-interoperable. Though DTH STBs comply with the licensing conditions to support Common Interface (CI) module based interoperability, in practice even they are not readily interoperable.