Nivedita Mookerji

New Delhi: The Tamil Nadu circle is the biggest beneficiary of telecom spectrum, according to official statistics.

Spectrum, or airwaves, is a very precious commodity because of its scarce availability.

Recently, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh had also said that the government should be able to maximise revenue from the allocation of a scarce resource like spectrum.

In Tamil Nadu, 15 mobile phone players (including existing and new firms) have been given as much as 75 MHz of spectrum to run their telecom services.

If you add to that the Chennai circle, you get another 48.85 MHz spectrum spread over eight telcos.

The total of Tamil Nadu and Chennai spectrum works out to 123.85 MHz, a figure which is much higher than any other circle. Incidentally, communications minister A Raja is from the Tamil Nadu constituency.

The total spectrum allocated to telecom players across the 23 circles of the country is 1,165.65 MHz, according to the figures available with the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (Trai).

In addition, some spectrum has been allotted to BSNL and MTNL on a trial basis, it is learnt.

Spectrum determines the quality and availability of mobile telephony in any given circle.

The Department of Telecommunications (DoT) is in negotiation with the Defence Ministry for getting unused spectrum vacated by the defence forces.

The vacated spectrum can then be reallocated to the telcos.

At present, there are over 300 million phone subscribers in the country, of which 261 million are mobile phone users.

Exactly 123.85 MHz of spectrum has been allocated to Tamil Nadu and Chennai together for a subscriber base of around 25 million, though many of the players are yet to begin their operations in the circle and therefore the user base is likely to go up.

The new players in these circles include Tata Teleservices for GSM, Reliance for GSM, Idea, Swan, Loop, Datacom and Unitech.

The existing players in Chennai and Tamil Nadu include Bharti, Vodafone, Aircel, Reliance for CDMA and BSNL.

While Mumbai and Delhi have among the highest mobile phone subscriber base among metros at 13.3 million and 16 million each, other circles with high subscriber base include Maharashtra at 20.61 million and Andhra Pradesh at 20 million.

At present, there’s no one-time fee for spectrum and a startup spectrum is given free to a new licencee, depending on its availability.

Any additional spectrum is given to the mobile phone operators depending on their subscriber base, as per the criteria set by the Department of Telecommunications. The finance ministry is in favour of spectrum being auctioned, like in some other countries.

Source : DNA