By IANS
New Delhi : Idea Cellular Ltd Friday shot off yet another strongly worded letter to the Department of Telecommunications (DoT), demanding grant of telecom licenses to them before allocating initial radio spectrum to other players.
The Aditya Birla-promoted company, a GSM player, also said it has already paid Rs.6.84 billion ($174 million) as the license entry fee and is awaiting the issuance of the Letter of Intent (LoI) for which it had applied on Jun 26, 2006 for rolling out its services in nine circles.
“We have blocked financial resources since, but have been prevented from effecting payment solely because the DoT has not issued the LoIs as per specified timelines,” said Rajat Mukarji, chief corporate affairs officer, Idea Cellular Ltd, in a letter to DoT secretary.
“Please note that any manipulation of initial spectrum allocation priority, achieved through the device of manipulation of dates of payment demands, would constitute an assault on government policy,” the letter added.
The letter said: “We confirm we wish to effect payment of Rs.684.59 crore (Rs.6.84 billion) towards license entry fee, and furnish financial and performance bank guarantees of Rs.220.00 crore (Rs.2.2 billion) and Rs.88.00 crore (Rs.880 million), respectively. These are against the LoIs due to us.”
The company had also sent a letter last week reiterating the same demands.
In a related development, a top official from DoT said the government is considering restructuring the revenues to be charged from telecom operators for using airwaves.
The government had last week accepted recommendations given by the telecom regulator, the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI), for allocation of spectrum to operators.
According to TRAI’s recommendations, telecom firms need to raise the minimum subscriber base between two to six times to obtain the airwaves.
This decision by the government has been severely criticised by CDMA operators like Reliance Communications and Tata Teleservices.
On the other hand, GSM operators like Airtel, Vodafone, Idea and Spice has accepted it as an “interim solution”.
However, even if it seems that the spectrum allocation battle is reaching some kind of solution, the tussle is far from being over with the media being bombarded by anonymous messages from both the GSM and CDMA camps.
“The private dominant operators Bharti, Idea, Vodafone have pre-emptively taken away the precious spectrum, far in excess of their entitlement of 6.2 MHz as per license terms and conditions, free of cost,” said one such anonymous letter.
The matter is, however, pending in the Delhi High Court, which will hear the case Jan 3.