Opportunity for Prasar Bharati to anchor a new national distribution channel

The Cellular Operators Association of India has spent the better part of a year arguing that earlier Direct-to-Mobile (D2M) trials were opaque, narrow and stitched together without the kind of consultative, technology-neutral process the government itself had promised. That argument has just lost most of its weight. A fresh round of laboratory and field validations on Tejas Networks’ D2M stack — conducted in the presence of officials from the Ministry of Information and Broadcasting, MeitY, the Department of Telecommunications, the Wireless Planning and Coordination Wing, the Telecom Engineering Centre, the Department of Science and Technology and Prasar Bharati — has, according to documents reviewed in trade circles, been cleared on every technical parameter the operators had flagged. For Reliance Jio, Bharti Airtel and Vodafone Idea, the runway to keep stalling D2M just got dramatically shorter.

The political subtext is worth pausing on. COAI’s resistance has never really been about heating in handsets or interference in 4G and 5G bands. It has been about who controls the 470-582 MHz UHF band, who pays for delivering video to 1.4 billion screens, and whether broadcasters can be allowed to bypass the data pipes that telcos have spent more than Rs 12 trillion building. By insisting on broader stakeholder consultations and trial re-runs, the operators were buying time. The new validation — explicitly designed to mirror the consultative framework COAI had demanded — collapses that delaying tactic. The same agencies whose absence the telecom lobby cited are now on record signing off.

The technical findings themselves are unspectacular precisely because they are comprehensive. Transmitter spectral compliance was tested against 2G, 3G, 4G and 5G; no measurable interference was recorded. Field trials in New Delhi confirmed that voice calls and SMS retained priority, with D2M streams automatically pausing during incoming calls — a direct answer to operators’ core consumer-experience concern. Single Frequency Network transmission, which allows multiple towers to run on the same channel, has been shown to deliver stronger indoor signals than the older Multi Frequency Network setup. The receiver ecosystem, including dongles, MarkOne handsets and home gateways, all built around the ATSC 3.0 standard, was found to be ready for production.

For Tejas Networks — quietly emerging as one of the biggest beneficiaries of India’s indigenous-tech push — this is a strategic inflection. The Tata-controlled equipment maker now owns a reference architecture that Prasar Bharati and the DoT can point to when commercial roll-outs are tendered. Every low-power low-tower transmitter network that gets greenlit beyond the pilot zones is a potential order book for Tejas. Every certified handset opens a downstream supply contract. In a market where most telecom hardware spend has flowed to Ericsson, Nokia and Samsung, an Indian vendor effectively setting the standards layer is no small win.

The bigger structural shift, however, is in how content will reach phones in the world’s largest mobile market. D2M is essentially FM-radio physics for video: a broadcast pipe that pushes IP-based audio, video and data straight to compatible devices without touching cellular data networks. For users on feature phones, on patchy 4G in tier-three towns, or simply unwilling to spend on data top-ups for live television, it is a near-zero-marginal-cost route to free-to-air content. For policymakers worried about exploding video traffic on already-strained 5G networks, it is offload infrastructure they do not have to subsidise. For Prasar Bharati, dismissed for years as a fading public broadcaster, it is the chance to become the backbone of an entirely new distribution channel.

What happens next is mostly procedural, but the friction will move. Device certification norms still need to be finalised; LPLT transmitter networks will need to expand beyond the current pilot footprint; and content rights frameworks — who can broadcast what, on whose spectrum, under what licensing model — will need to be hammered out. Each of those will be a fresh battlefront, and the telecom lobby resist every one of them. But the umbrella objection — that D2M had not been properly tested by the right agencies — has now been formally retired.

For all the noise about whether India’s 5G investments would be commercially viable, the more interesting question may be the one D2M is about to force: in a country where data is cheap but never free, who really owns the last mile to a billion phones?
BCS Bureau