Telecom groups join to slam Trai’s recommendations on spectrum pricing

Telecom carriers, both GSM and CDMA, have found common ground in opposing telecom regulator Trai's recommendations on spectrum auctions, especially on pricing of the premium 700 MHz band and are planning to approach the Department of Telecom (DoT) to contest sectoral regulator's recommendations.

The two telecom operator groups also slammed the regulator for hastily uploading on its website the results of recent independent call drop tests which, they said, "do not represent actual performance."

"We are taken by surprise by the undue haste displayed by the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (Trai) in uploading / publishing the quality of service (QoS) parameter results of independent drive tests conducted during December 2015 and January 2016 in seven cities, despite our members having strongly refuted independent audit findings and substantiated our rebuttal with drive tests reports conducted by us," said Cellular Operators Association of India (COAI) and Association of Unified Telecom Service Providers of India (Auspi) in a joint letter to Trai chairman RS Sharma.

They also sought immediate withdrawal of the results.

As a first step, the operators plan to write to DoT to defer the auction of 700 MHz band and point out possible errors in calculation of price of the new spectrum band.

Trai has fixed the price based on formula given in 2012 without considering the changes in the industry since then, they point out.

Major telecom service providers have already requested DoT to defer sale of 700 MHz spectrum, saying that ecosystem for providing services in this band was not developed and sale would lead to under-utilisation of the spectrum for several years and block industry's crucial fund.

Trai has recommended a record high base price of Rs11,485 crore per MHz for 700 MHz, in a move that would yield a whopping Rs4,00,000 crore for the government on sale of the sale of the new band alone.