The government on Wednesday has issued a notice for next round of telecom spectrum auctions, which will start from March. It has asked the interested operators to submit their applications by February 5.
It may be recalled that the Cabinet on December 17, had approved the proposal for the auction of 2,251.25 Megahertz (MHz) of spectrum worth ₹3.92 lakh crore at the base price.
The bidders’ final list will be declared on February 24 and bids for spectrum in frequency bands of 700 MHz, 800Mhz, 900 Mhz, 2100 Mhz, 2300 Mhz and 2500 MHz will start from March 1, as per the notice. The Department of Telecommunications (DoT) has fixed January 12 for the pre-bid conference and last date for seeking clarification to the notice on January 28.
"A single auction process will be carried out for assigning spectrum blocks in various bands -- 700 MHz, 800 MHz, 900 MHz, 1800 MHz, 2100 MHz, 2300 MHz and 2500 MHz bands and is referred to in this document as the “Auction”. However, it may be noted that the government reserves the right to use any other means to assign the spectrum as it may deem fit without assigning any reason whatsoever," the notice said.
According to analysts, the auction may be interested by operators only for renewals, and except Reliance Jio, others may skip from buying additional radio waves.
According to a recent Credit Suisse report, most of the operators will be bidding for renewals of the spectrum and based on TRAI's last reserve price. It expects renewal of expiring spectrum to cost around ₹15,000 crore for Bharti Airtel and ₹11,500 crore for Reliance Jio.
It expects Jio to add more spectrum, while Airtel to restrict itself to renewing expiring spectrum. "We expect Jio to purchase additional spectrum (beyond expiring spectrum) as it will look to augment its network capacity having garnered 35 per cent subscriber market share and a much higher share of traffic," it had said.
"We do not expect Vodafone Idea (Vi) to participate in the auction where its 6.2MHz and 38.2 MHz spectrum in 900/ 1800 MHz bands is expiring, given its cash flow constraints," it added.