By IANS
New Delhi : Although the department of telecommunications (DoT) called upon India’s top telecom bosses with the hope of amicably solving the ongoing spectrum imbroglio, the meeting yielded no results.
The meeting, which took place in two phases here, was attended by Airtel chief Sunil Bharti Mittal, Reliance Communications’ Anil Ambani, Vodafone’s managing director Asim Ghosh, and Sanjeev Aga, managing director of Aditya Birla Group’s Idea Cellular.
DoT secretary D.S. Mathur presided over the meeting, which went on for about six hours behind closed doors, along with other senior officials from the ministry and Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI).
“We had very preliminary discussions with the DoT. It did not come out with any concrete proposal,” Aga told reporters here while coming out of the meeting.
According to industry sources, Mathur asked GSM operators to withdraw their petition from the telecom tribunal.
Anil Ambani of Reliance Communications, which last month got the permission to roll out GSM services, accused GSM operators of holding back more spectrum than was legally allowed, sources said.
The DoT last week sent invitations to the chiefs of these telecom companies, both from the GSM and CDMA clans, to work out a balanced approach on how the scarce resource spectrum would be allocated.
Telecom operators have been long demanding that radio waves or spectrum, which is currently under the control of the defence ministry, be given to them urgently to enhance their operations and tackle the increasing number of subscribers.
The war started last month when DoT recommended subscriber base criteria for GSM operators to become eligible for additional spectrum.
According to the Telecom Engineering Centre (TEC), the technical arm of DoT that formulated the policy, the subscriber base needs to be increased by 4-16 times.
For example, in a network 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 it should have 1.9 million subscribers for the next band of 6.2 MHz.
In response to this, GSM body Cellular Operators Association of India (COAI) filed a petition with the Telecom Dispute Settlement Appellate Tribunal (TDSAT) that the process followed by DoT was “unacceptable and flawed”. It also protested allowing both GSM and CDMA technology for mobile phone services.
The Prime Minister’s Office had to intervene for the meeting and, according to sources, this is just the beginning of a series of negotiations that the industry is set to witness.
India is currently the world’s fastest growing cellular market, adding 6-7 million subscribers a month.