After garnering over Rs.67,000 crore from the auction of 3G spectrum, the Department of Telecommunications will start the process of allocating radio waves from Wednesday, which will pave way for the roll out of advanced mobile services by private operators in their respective circles for which they have bagged the spectrum.
Almost all the major telecom players — Bharti Airtel, Vodafone Essar, Idea Cellular, Reliance Communications, Tata Teleservices, Idea cellular, Aircel — that have won spectrum in some circles across India out of the total 22, but none has emerged as a true national player having spectrum to launch pan-India service.
Initially, there were some doubts regarding vacation of spectrum by defence forces, but now everything has been streamlined and they would start allocating spectrum to all winners, said a DoT official. This would pave way for the launch of high-speed mobile broadband services.
Operators have been promising that subscribers would get 3G services by the end of this year if the government allots spectrum in September as promised. The 3G technology will allow telecom operators to offer better quality of voice calls under 3G as compared to 2G services. It will also help in faster downloading of music, movie and other data files on their mobiles.
