The Department of Telecommunications (DoT) is working out a proposal that will see existing telecom operator give-up a part-of their spectrum to the government for re-farming, says news reports.
DoT is working on this proposal to reach a mutual agreement with telecom operators over issues such as spectrum pricing, and re-farming prior to the roll out of spectrum auction that is scheduled for August 31, 2012.
The spectrum given-up by existing telecom players will be available for bidding by new players.
Earlier DoT had approved the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI?s) proposal of re-farming as part of which mobile operators such as Bharti Airtel, Vodafone India and Idea Cellular will have to surrender a part of spectrum held by them in the 900 MHz which is used by these operators for 2G services. These telecom players will have the option of re-purchasing the vacated spectrum through auction process likely to be held in first half of 2013.
TRAI?s recommendations on spectrum pricing were aimed at allowing telecom operators to provide wireless services using any technology be it 2G, 3G or 4G. For this telecom operators would have to pay a minimum of Rs 36.22 billion
per MHz.
At present, mobile operators are using 900 MHz and 1,800 MHz band for providing 2G GSM services for mobile telephony, 800 MHz band for 2G CDMA based services, 2100 MHz band for 3G and 2300 MHz band for 4G wireless broadband services.
DoT proposes to charge old telecom operators for their existing spectrum with new license fee which is to be discovered through auction process.
