Eight telcos to bid for spectrum, Videocon, Sistema opts out

Eight telcos to bid for spectrum, Videocon, Sistema opts out
Tuesday, 17 February 2015 - 6:20am IST | Place: New Delhi | Agency: dna | From the print edition

• The spectrum of March 4 envinced active interest with eight of the 10 private telecom operators having submitted their applications on Monday, the last date for expressing intent.

  The spectrum of March 4 envinced active interest with eight of the 10 private telecom operators having submitted their applications on Monday, the last date for expressing intent.
  The auction will generate revenues close to around Rs 80,000 crore for the government which will help meeting its fiscal deficit target of 4.1% of the GDP.
  All major players including Airtel, Vodafone, Idea, RCom, Reliance Jio, Uninor, Aircel and Tata Teleservices have submitted their forms. Sistema Shyam Teleservices Ltd (SSTL) and Videocon, however, have decided to opt out of it.
  The combined market share of the two players would be less than 2% of the total mobile services market.
  G Krishna Kumar, telecom professional based in Bangalore, said their absence in the auction would not be of much consequence.
  "While, ideally, we would expect all the existing providers to participate in the auction process, it is perfectly fine for a few to drop out. In the current scenario, Videocon and Sistema together account for only about 1.5% of the wireless subscribers in the country," he said,
  SSTL, which operates its services in the 800 megahertz (MHz) band, has decided to keep out of bidding because of steep reserve price fixed and its pending complaint against Department of Telecom (DoT) with the Telecom Disputes Settlement and Appellate Tribunal (TDSAT) for making the spectrum allocated to it in the 2013 auction contiguous.
  "SSTL has consistently maintained that the pricing of 800 MHz spectrum at Rs 3646 crore per MHz, is way out of line and does not merit a strong business case for buying additional spectrum. The company continues to maintain that such pricing does not take into account the realities of the prevailing ecosystem within the band," said the statement issued by the company.
  The company currently holds 3.75 MHz spectrum in nine circles including Delhi, Rajasthan, Gujarat, Karnataka, Kerala, Tamil Nadu, Uttar Pradesh (west), West Bengal and Kolkata. A company spokesperson said the company was waiting for the issue of non-contiguous spectrum to be resolved in TDSAT, whose next hearing was on February 18.
  In the auction held in 2013, SSTL was the only bidder for the CDMA spectrum.
  "Since SSTL was the sole bidder during the said (2013) auction and there is no other successful operator for rearrangement of frequencies, it is incumbent upon DoT to rearrange/reassign the frequency to make the spectrum allotted to SSTL contiguous," it noted in its statement.
  The government is offering 385.75 MHz spectrum in four bands including 800, 900, 1800 and 2100.
  Airtel, Vodafone, Idea Cellular and Reliance Telecom, whose licenses will be expiring in the current fiscal, are expected to be aggressively bidding for spectrum to win it back