The Department of Telecommunications (DoT) has announced a new spectrum allocation policy without waiting for the group of ministers’ (GoM) recommendations on the issue. The policy, which will be put into immediate effect, is linked to the operators’ subscriber base and retains the present 2:1 allocation for GSM and CDMA operators. The policy, however, does away with the condition that requires CDMA operators to add more users than their GSM counterparts for getting additional spectrum. Now both will need to have an identical number of users to get extra spectrum. Operators have expressed concern over the unusually high number of subscribers specified by DoT for spectrum allocation and have termed the policy an “ad hoc move”.
