Top executives at Bharti Airtel, Reliance Communications, Idea Cellular and Vodafone have written to Ravi Shankar Prasad, India’s Minister of Communications and Information Technology, asking for the upcoming spectrum auction to be deferred. This comes after the Department of Telecom (DoT) was accused of having delayed allotment of air waves to those operators who placed the winning bids for them in the auction which took place in February 2014.
The letter addressed to Prasad, has also been marked to Prime Minister Narendra Modi. Airtel, Reliance, Idea and Vodafone have noted that the ‘noble’ request has been made with ‘public interest’ at heart seeing as the auction scheduled for February 2015, will most likely be marred by inadequate availability of spectrum. The telecom companies think the move will help save government revenues, allow for continuity of services, secure existing investments and so on, says The Economic Times.
Service providers with licenses expiring in 2015 – 16 could continue serving their customers with their current in-use spectrum until additional airwaves across bands are available again, according to the four carriers. They have suggested that until a suitable auction date can be picked, those with permits expiring during the aforesaid period, can pay the additional charges as proposed by the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI) in February this year.
Any further adjustments in payments according to the price discovered in the next round of auctions could also be billed to carriers with licenses expiring in 2015 – 16, if needed. TRAI had warned about failure to add airwaves across bands for the 2015 auction being likely to cause an artificial scarcity and lead to fierce bidding by telecom operators keen to win back their airwaves which will be part of the forthcoming sale as their permits expire in 2015 – 16.
Also see: DoT’s spectrum delay may lead to Vodafone, Airtel customers facing network disruptions
Playing pass the parcel with spectrum will affect the common man when a provider is forced to shut shop in a particular service circle just because it didn’t win back the permit for the airwaves it was previously holding for that area. Airtel, Vodafone, Idea and Reliance have alternatively suggested that the government auction all 900MHz spectrum allocated to the 1996 – 2000 licensees when permits belonging to state-run BSNL and MTNL come up for renewal.