Well we had blogged about the fact that 3G auction could be delayed and delayed it is but not by much its scheduled to be two weeks later than the earlier scheduled date due to requests by operators and bankers. The premise is that most global fund start a new financial year by January and hence would be willing to invest in operators in bidding of the 3G spectrum allocation.
The timeline according to this Hindu article is as follows:
November 30th: Auction design, bid document to be prepared
December 15th: Inviting operators to bid
December 31th: Pre-qualification of bidders
January 15th: Auction to be completed
January 25th: Signing of contracts with successful bidders
January 31th: Depositing of first tranch of auction money
3G is surely seeing a lot of traction as our visit to the recently held 3G conference showed us that there are a line of telecom content providers who are currently servicing the international markets are eagerly awaiting to launch their services in India.
On talking to one of the 3G content providers at the 3G conference I was told that though the spectrum may be auctioned by December (now Jan) the actual roll out of services would take atleast a year as the operators would take time to build servicing capability.
