The differences between the government and various industry bodies over 2G spectrum allocation continues.
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The Association of Unified Telecom Service Providers of India (AUSPI) has asked Kapil Sibal, Minister of Telecommunications and IT to defer the proposal to charge all spectrum held by existing operators at a price determined through auction.
AUSPI wants this proposal to be deferred until the outcome of Presidential Reference on 2G spectrum judgment is out.
AUSPI has said that there cannot be any justifiable ground to delay the enforcement of the charging of fee for the excess spectrum held by old GSM operators.
As per the licenses issues by the Department of Telecommunications (DoT) to mobile operators, license holders were eligible to get upto 6.2 MHz of spectrum.
The government initially allocated 4.4 MHz of spectrum initially and allotted another 1.8 MHz of spectrum subject to mobile operators meeting certain criterion. At the same time, some telecom operators were issued excess spectrum beyond 6.2 MHz. And according to AUSPI this excess spectrum has benefitted existing GSM operators.
AUSPI said that the Telecom Commission had agreed to charge this excess spectrum in 2008 but in so far, government has not done anything to implement a policy to charge GSM operators for excess spectrum.
