Many renound telecoms firms including Bharti Airtel, Vodafone and Etisalat will be on the race for third-generation (3G) Indian mobile spectrum in an April auction. The auction will start on April 9.  Bharti Airtel & Vodafone already applied for the auction for all of India's 22 telecoms zones. Abu Dhabi-based Etisalat , which has a telecoms joint venture in India didn’t applied for the auction yet but expected to apply before the end of deadline on Friday. Reliance Communications & Tatas also placed their bid for third-generation (3G) Indian mobile spectrum. India's fifth-ranked mobile firm and 26 percent owned by NTT DoCoMo , submitted its interest to bid on Thursday.

U.S.-based chipmaker Qualcomm said on Wednesday it had applied to bid in the BWA auction to help it deploy fourth-generation long-term evolution technology (LTE) in India.

This new next-generation technologies would allow high-speed Internet access and data transfer on mobile phones and boost usage of data services, where margins are higher.  Depending on the outcome of these auctions, India will get high speed telephony, also known as 3G, by the end of the year.

Right now India is the second-biggest wireless market in the world with more than 550 million mobile users and it added a monthly average of nearly 15 million subscribers in 2009. They are expecting new foreign investment on this field for new foreign firms  that are not it this huge market yet. India is also expecting to see vicious price war has pushed voice call charges sharply lower

India has put on the block three 3G slots in most of its 22 telecoms service areas, while two slots per service area are up for grabs in a simultaneous but separate auction for broadband wireless access radio airwaves.

Indian government has fixed the base price for the auction to start.  The government-fixed base price is 35 billion rupees or $770 million for all-India radio waves. But it is expected that the final bid will be in between 1 billion and $1.5 billion due to the huge demand for scarce spectrum and cut-throat competition.

Source:Reuter
Key words: mobile networks,3g mobile phone,telecom management,india voip,broadband wireless,3g mobile,mobile operators


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