The Hindu Business Line : DoT plans separate 3G policy for CDMA players

The move comes as a relief to CDMA players including Reliance Communication and Tata Teleservices which had expressed concern that the proposed 3G policy had no mention of spectrum allocation for CDMA operators. Until now DoT’s draft policy guidelines had specified plans to auction spectrum only for GSM-based cellular services providers.

However, DoT has put up a new note for approval by the Ministry of Communication which mentions auctioning spectrum for CDMA players in the 450 Mhz and 800 Mhz frequency band.

This means that seventy one million CDMA mobile subscribers can also look forward to availing third generation mobile services.

The 800 Mhz and 450 Mhz bands are frequencies used by CDMA operators globally for 3G services. Third generation mobile services promises to bring high speed data connectivity on handsets apart from improving the quality of voice calls.

Consumers will be able to get services like streaming video, mobile TV and community specific value added services.

While GSM based operators will evolve to using the WCDMA technology for offering this service, CDMA players will use the EVDO technology.

Each of these technologies operates best in a specific frequency band.

“Spectrum shall be auctioned in the 450 Mhz band and in 800 Mhz band for EVDO services when it becomes available, for which guidelines shall be issued separately,” said the DoT note.

Reliance Communications, Tata Teleservices, Sistema backed Shyam Telelink and State owned Bharat Sanchar Nigam Ltd are the major CDMA operators in the country.

An earlier DoT draft guideline had said that the spectrum for these operators will be treated differently wherein they will be asked to pay a fraction of the amount quoted by the GSM counterparts for 3G services. However, the problem is that DoT has only 2 slots in the 800 Mhz band and there are four operators. Therefore DoT has now proposed to go for an auction.

GSM auction

For GSM players, DoT is making plans to auction spectrum for at least 5 operators in each circle. Senior DoT officials said that though the Government has spectrum available to accommodate 10-12 players in each circle, all of it may not be released by the defence forces at one go.

Therefore the auction will be done in phases wherein chunks of 20-25 Mhz will be auctioned with each operator getting not more than 5 Mhz.

DoT officials said that though some circles have about 60 Mhz of unused spectrum, the allocation will depend on when the Defence will release it.

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DoT scraps plan to auction 3G for CDMA players

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