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High Reserve Price for WiMax Auction upsets ISPs Again while India’s Internet Usage sees a Steady Rise
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The country’s Department of Telecom (DoT) have come up with some new set of guidelines for auctioning off the spectrum for WiMax in the country, something which has greatly upset the Internet Service Providers (ISPs) in the country. As per the new guidelines laid down by DoT, the reserve price for the auction has been raised from the earlier Rs. 550 crore to a whopping Rs. 1010 crore.
This, according to ET, has ‘deeply distressed’ the ISPs who are looking forward to the implementation of the WiMax services in the country. The country holds a great deal of scope for internet usage which has been increasing over the years. More and more people are getting access to the internet and the reach of the new-age media is definitely maximizing its outreach. According to a recent report released by Akamai Technologies, one of the largest enterprise application providers, among the total traffic monitored by them, India ranked 14th in terms of unique IPs, accounting over 2.1 million unique IPs from the country. This is a growth of over 4.5 percent over the previous years, reports ChannelTimes.
Implementation of WiMax technologies across the country will make it even easier for consumers to get access to the internet. However, with the DoT constantly increasing the reserve prices of the auction, that doesn’t seem to be a possibility in the coming days. Mr. Jasjit Sawhney, CEO of Net4, who spoke to the paper, said:
The initial reserve pricing of Rs 550 crore was itself so high, now the revised pricing will hurt a lot more. The ISPs do not have the capacity to pay such a huge amount,
The ISPs are now trying to demand a separate auction for WiMax and will soon draft a letter to the country’s communications minister Mr. A Raja. Presently, the DoT cannot carry out the auction unless these ISPs vacate the 2.5Ghz spectrum that has been allotted to them since 2003. The ISPs had already threatened to move TDSAT if the government tried to take back the spectrum, but now seem to have softened their stance.
The ISPs maintain that the auctioning of the WiMax spectrum should be completely separated from the overall process of auctioning the 3G spectrum and that blocks should be reserved by the DoT for exclusive bidding by the ISPs.
The country is all set to undergo a complete revolution w.r.t to the telecommunications industry with the auctioning of the 3G spectrum auction for GSM, CDMA and even WiMax services set to happen in the coming weeks. There has been a lot of activity in this space in the days approaching the auction and it can only be left upon time to tell us what the future holds.
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