Government approves auction of telecom spectrum at reserve price $11.6 billion

New Delhi: A total of 10,523.1 MHz airwaves in eight bands -800, 900, 1800, 2100, 2300, 2500, 3300 MHz, and 26 GHz will be up for sale. However, the timeline has not been disclosed. The airwaves auction will include airwaves held by firms undergoing insolvency which will upgrade the government finances and will certainly assist in narrowing the budget deficit in the South Asian nation.

Additional airwaves will improve the quality of telecom services and widen the coverage for consumers.

 

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This would integrate to help out major Indian wireless carriers as well like, Reliance Jio Infocomm Ltd, Bharati Airtel Ltd, and Vodafone Idea Ltd, to boost services in the nation with more than a billion phone users. The 5G services were launched in late 2022.

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The recent auction is slightly mild as compared to the previous dealing in 2022 where the government had recorded Rs 1.5 trillion in output while selling 72,097.85 MHz units of spectrum and sold 5G airwaves for the first time. The government was expecting an average of Rs 10,000 crore from the upcoming spectrum auction. Meanwhile, the cabinet has also approved reserving an additional 5MHz spectrum in the 700 MHz band for the railways for the national rollout of Kavach, over the earlier assigned 5MHz for the automatic train protection system.

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