By IANS
New Delhi : Notwithstanding the strong protest of GSM operators, the Department of Telecommunications (DoT) has accepted its technical arm’s proposal to allocate the scarce radio waves to all operators based on the number of subscribers.
The technical wing of DoT, Telecom Engineering Centre (TEC), in its report to DoT, has suggested that the subscriber-linked criteria for fresh spectrum allocation be raised by anywhere in between 2-15 times depending on the network.
This move by the government is expected to give a severe blow to the GSM biggies such Airtel, Vodafone and Idea.
According to the TEC, in a network for example like New Delhi, where the demand for mobile services is huge, a telecom operator has to have 600,000 subscribers to get a band of 4.4 MHz of spectrum, while for the next band of 6.2 MHz it should have 1.9 million subscribers.
Calling the proposal as “absurd” Bharti Airtel chief Sunil Bharti Mittal said in a letter to DoT secretary D.S. Mathur: “The outcome of the hurried exercise at TEC is a sad commentary on how international and time tested norms for spectrum allocation are being ignored.”
Reacting strongly to the fact that these new guidelines had not been exercised while allocating spectrum to state-run BSNL and MTNL, Mittal said: “Surely the experts within the department should have helped BSNL and MTNL, the government owned operators to be the most spectrum efficient and be role models and not the other way around as most inefficient operators having the largest amount of spectrum with a lower subscriber base.”
According to industry sources, the GSM players have filed a petition to the telecom tribunal on the issue.
The Cellular Operators Association of India (COAI), a GSM industry lobby, in its reaction said: “The excessive hike in subscriber numbers was being done with a single point agenda to choke and deprive the existing GSM operators of spectrum and to facilitate a priority entry of select players into GSM.”
“An increase in the subscriber linkages by as much as 800 percent in the revised criteria that was reviewed only last year, indicates that the objective is not to ensure spectrum efficiency but rather to ensure spectrum deficiency for the existing GSM operators,” said T.V. Ramachandran, director general, COAI.
However, its party time for CDMA operators and according to its lobby group Association of Unified Telecom Service Providers of India (AUSPI): “This initiative taken by the government will definitely help in ensuring that spectrum is allocated transparently and utilized most efficiently.”
“As a result, GSM service providers will now have to use spectrum more efficiently which they have not so far being doing by saving of capital expenditure,” S.C. Khanna, secretary general, AUSPI said in a statement.