Eight telcos apply for 3 February spectrum auction
16 Jan 2014
Eight telecom operators including Vodafone, Bharti Airtel and Reliance Jio Infocomm have applied for spectrum auction slated for 3 February, raising hopes that this round will see strong participation the government would garner more than Rs11,343 crore from it.
"Eight applicants have applied. The auction will be successful, that is what we believe," telecom secretary M F Farooqui told reporters in New Delhi. ''Vodafone filed the first application, followed by Airtel. We are expecting most of the companies to apply.''
Loop Telecom and Videocon, however, have not applied for the bidding. Today is the last day for submitting the applications and companies have the option to withdraw their bids by 27 January.
In the last round of auction held in March 2013, none of the GSM operators had bid for radiowaves, citing high reserve or base price.
The applications come amidst uncertainty on a number of issues such as spectrum usage charge, merger and acquisition guidelines, spectrum sharing and its trading. Farooqui said that all issues will be resolved before auction.
The government is expecting a minimum of Rs11,300 crore from the spectrum auction. It has set a revenue target of Rs40,874.50 crore for this fiscal from the auction, including auction amount, one-time spectrum charge and annual regular licence fee.
About 403 megahertz of 2G spectrum in the 1800 MHz band and about 45 MHz of spectrum in the premium 900 MHz band is being put up for auction. The union cabinet has fixed the base price for the 1800 Mhz band for pan-India at Rs1,765 crore per MHz, about 26 per cent lower than in the March sale.
For the 900 MHz band, it approved a rate up to 53 per cent lower than the previous auction price. It is Rs360 crore per MHz for Delhi, Rs328 crore for Mumbai and Rs125 crore for Kolkata.
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