The Planning Commission has asked the Department of Telecommunications (DoT) to allow dynamic spectrum access to operators in the country and modify the rules of the upcoming 2G spectrum auctions accordingly.
According to the policy of dynamic spectrum access policy, if any portion of the spectrum held by an operator remains unutilised at any point of time (including during couple of hours in a day when cellular traffic is at its lowest), then this bandwidth can be used by another mobile operator during that period. The concept is different from spectrum sharing wherein two operators share their airwaves and use them jointly to for increase efficiencies.
The Planning Commission believes that the modern technologies allows service providers, other than the licensee, to utilise those parts of the spectrum which are unused by the customers of that licensee at any point in time. If this option is opened up, it would improve the value of the spectrum which in turn would improve the realisation expected from the proposed 2G spectrum auction.
Going by the global technical opinion on this subject it is believed that such dynamic spectrum access provides effective utilisation of spectrum, a scarce resource.
DoT in its discussions with the Comission has indicated that the proposal is broadly in tune with principles proposed under the National Telecom Policy 2012. DoT is likely to allow spectrum sharing for 2G spectrum. However, this would not be applicable to 3G spectrum.
