The Hindu Business Line : Right call on spectrum

In line with the promise made by the Prime Minister recently, the Department of Telecommunications has announced norms for releasing additional spectrum to mobile operators. The DoT's criteria for release of spectrum are welcome, as they open the door for negotiations between the GSM and CDMA technology camps to solve this niggling controversy. This issue has been hanging fire since May last year, when the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India made the spectrum recommendations to the government. In recent months, scarce spectrum has been cited as a reason for the growing congestion in mobile networks, affecting the quality of service.

From the larger perspective of resolving this contentious issue, the GSM and CDMA technology camps are in a mood to hammer out a compromise now than at any time in the past. Since the launch of the lifetime offers and One India tariff plan late last year, the number of new mobile subscribers has almost doubled to 4-5 million per month the past couple of months. If this growth rate has to be sustained to reach the government's ambitious target of 200 million mobile subscribers by 2007, spectrum will have to be available freely. In this backdrop, the DoT has done the right thing by fixing the spectrum criteria somewhere in between the demands of the GSM and CDMA camps. The CDMA camp may be peeved that spectrum will be issued in the 2:1 ratio in favour of GSM operators, but still find this acceptable. Primarily, because, at the height of the limited mobility controversy in mid-2003, the CDMA camp, in its submissions to the court, had claimed that it was 5.31 times more spectrally efficient than GSM. A 2:1 ratio may prove to be a healthy compromise on their part.

On the other end, with over 70 per cent of the new mobile subscribers opting for GSM, this camp's spectrum requirement is likely to be greater. At the same time, the crucial issue of interconnection that is linked to spectrum has not been resolved. As the mobile subscriber numbers have swelled, there has been an enormous strain at the point of interconnection among mobile operators. With considerable deterioration in the quality of service such as frequent blocking of calls, call drops and poor voice quality, TRAI issued show-cause notices to some operators recently. This issue is now before the Telecom Appellate Tribunal. Since spectrum and interconnection are linked, unless both the issues are resolved simultaneously, the overall quality of service may not improve dramatically.

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