Spectrum review panel for free start-up

By siliconindia   |   Friday, 21 December 2007, 18:36 IST
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New Delhi: The official panel for allocating spectrum norms recommended allotting minimum airwaves along with the license and favored the auction route for distributing additional spectrum. "First, grant a minimum allotment (sic) to an operator along with the licence, and then auction the remaining spectrum, with a cap on the total spectrum that any operator can have in a circle," said a 22 page report by a committee headed by R Bandhopadhyay. A technical committee could be set up to specify the different methods including auction for allotment of additional spectrum, said the panel. While on the issue of whether to consider subscriber-linked criteria as recommended by telecom regulator TRAI or the Telecom Engineering Centre (TEC), the committee has left the decision to the government due to sharp differences within the panel. Some members of the panel said that criteria prescribed by TRAI be considered for CDMA-based mobile services, while that of TEC for GSM operations. The panel also said that incremental quantum of spectrum should be reduced to 1 MHz from 1.8-2.4 MHz till now for the GSM players as it was now possible to deploy an increment of 1 MHz effectively in the network. "The additional subscriber base supported by each extra one MHz is also large. The incremental quantum of spectrum allotted for GSM can therefore be reduced to one MHz. It is therefore recommended that the subscriber-linked criterion be modified to specify the subscriber base for steps of one MHz additional spectrum in the case of GSM," the committee said. It also noted that GSM operators have already exceeded subscriber-based criterion as per the existing policy without allotment of any additional spectrum. "Depending on the parameters assumed, one can get widely varying numbers including numbers higher than obtained by the Telecom Engineering Centre," the panel said.