Depart of Telecom seeks Defence and Finance Ministries’ Nod for Spectrum Auctions

The Department of Telecommunications (“DoT”) has finalised the draft note for the spectrum auctions early in 2015 and the same has been sent to the Ministry of Defence and the Ministry of Finance for vetting.

As per news reports, the Government plans to auction some amount of 3G spectrum with spectrum in the bands of 800 MHz (used by CDMA operators), 900 MHz and 1800 MHz being used by Airtel, Vodafone, Idea Cellular and Reliance Communications for 2G services across India.

The Government is expected to rope-in revenue of at least INR 93.55 billion from auctioning spectrum in the three bands of spectrum and also expects to raise additional INR 50 billion from auction of 3G spectrum in the 2,100 MHz band, provided it is vacated by the Defence Ministry and is consequentially put up for auctions.

Recently, the long pending contentious issues between the DoT and Defence relating to auction of 3G spectrum such as (a) vacation of spectrum in the 2,100 MHz band and the Defence Ministry in-principle agreeing to vacate 5 MHz of spectrum across 17 out of 22 telecom services circles, and (b) swapping of 15 MHz spectrum in the 2,100 MHz band with a likewise amount in the 1,900 band to be released by the Defence Ministry and DoT respectively, have been sorted out. Please refer our previous post on the resolution between the Government departments here. However, there still remain certain technicalities to be clarified and cleared for the arrangement between the DoT and the Ministry of Defence to be effectively implemented. For this reason, the DoT is taking views of the Ministry of Defence on the note on spectrum auction, before the same could be sent to the cabinet.

It is expected that the spectrum bands would be put up for auction in the forthcoming auctions scheduled to be held in the month of February 2015.