Pakistan Information & News

NEW DELHI: GSM cellular industry lobby group COAI has made a strong pitch against auctioning the spectrum for 3G (third generation) services that enable the people to download video, graphics and music on to their mobiles at very high speeds.

COAI has said that, if at all it decides to do so, the government should charge about Rs 1,000 crore from the GSM cellular industry (about Rs 200 per operator, in 2.1 GHz band), which would recover the cost of relocating defence services out of the 2.1 GHz band.

COAI has said that in case of shortage of spectrum there should be a “beauty contest approach, with pre-determined weightages being transparently applied to parameters like tariffs, investments and infrastructure sharing.”

It has said that spectrum auction should be avoided at all costs because it could lead to “irresponsible bidding” by the telecom firms and may make 3G services expensive.

A few years ago, European nations auctioned 3G spectrum that fetched the governments about $100 billion in licence fee, but led to a global meltdown of telecom sector and delayed the launch of services by several years.

On average, telecom firms in EU paid Rs 85-120 crore per MHz. “This would work out to exorbitant price of Rs 10,000 crore or more for all India 5 MHz spectrum.

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