TRAI chairman Rahul Khullar at a consumer outreach program in Bangalore said that India has to increase the quantum of spectrum for better mobile connectivity and speedy downloads.
“Unless we have more spectrum, we cannot increase the speed for faster connectivity and quicker downloads,” Khullar said.
Bemoaning scarcity of spectrum when mobile communication had became the country’s lifeline, with a whopping 900 million users, he said India had 40 percent less airwaves than a European country, which could be similar to Karnataka or Andhra Pradesh in size, IANS reported.
“Spectrum scarcity is our biggest problem as it is less than half of the capacity available in China. In the recent auction, airwaves that were available over two decades ago (1994) were sold as there was no additional spectrum,” he said.
In the latest spectrum e-auctions conducted over three weeks this month, the government raked in $18 billion from telecom operators, as the bids were amongst highest bids by global standards.
Since 2010, when the new round of auctions started and up to 2014, the government had put-up spectrum in the 800 MHz, 900 MHz, 1,800 MHz, 2,100 MHz and 2,300 MHz bands for bidding. It managed to sell 1,635.47 MHz of spectrum across these bands and raise about $30 billion.
In the latest tranch of auction that concluded on March 24, the government has put up 103.75 MHz in 800 MHz band, 177.8 MHz in 900 MHz band, 99.2 MHz in 1,800 MHz band and 85 MHz in 2,100 MHz band.
When spectrum was sold in 2010 for introducing 3G services, barring the state-run BSNL, private cellular operators did not buy airwaves for using across the country but in some circles.
“If more spectrum is not freed for greater use, quality of service will suffer as mobile connectivity is being used more for data, videos and other applications than voice in the past,” said Khullar.
“Unlike in other countries, we have to provide mobile connectivity in urban and rural areas, where problems are different in terms of infrastructure, last mile connectivity and quality of service due to congestion and capacity constraints,” TRAI chief Khullar added.
Last week, the India government said the spectrum auction in 1800 MHz, 900 MHz, 2100 MHz and 800 MHz band, which commenced on 4th March 2015 and ended on 25th March 2015 after 115 rounds over 19 days, has fetched over Rs 1,09,874 crore.
The government tried to sell 470.75 MHz in 800, 900, 1800 and 2100 MHz bands against 390 MHz in Nov. 2012 and 426 MHz in February 2014.
The government noted that prices have significantly increased in 50 of the 69 offerings with bid price being as high as 300 percent over reserve price in some instances. Over 88 percent of the spectrum on offer has been provisionally committed at a value of over Rs 109874 crore. Overall increases over estimated proceeds from auction is about 37 percent.
In November 2012 the total realization from auction of spectrum in 1800 MHz band was Rs 9407 crore and in Feb 2014 Rs 61162 has been realized.
