The Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI) has approved guidelines for spectrum trading, thereby allowing operators to buy and sell spectrum. Thereafter, a DoT committee will examine the guidelines and share it with the Telecom Commission for its final approval.
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With this, operators can now trade spectrum bought through an auction or acquired by paying the market price. However, administratively allocated spectrum cannot be traded.
Further, TRAI has suggested that operators will have to trade spectrum at service area level and not a portion of it. As per the recommendations, operators holding spectrum across services 2G, 3G, 4G and CDMA – should be allowed to trade the spectrum. Operators will not require prior permission from the government to ink such agreements, but will have to inform the Department of Telecommunications (DoT) six week before the effective date of trading of spectrum.
According to TRAI, spectrum trading will not change the original validity period for which the spectrum has been allocated to an operator. The regulatory authority has recommended a lock-in period of two years on spectrum that an operator acquires through an auction or trading before it can trade in it further.
TRAI has also stated that the government may collect a transaction fee on spectrum being traded between operators. The proposed transaction fee would be one per cent of the total transaction amount.
