It was August 15 2005 when the Press Trust of India came up with a report saying “3G Launch in India early next year“. In this report, BSNL & MTNl were supposed to rolled out services by January 2006 while the private companies would also have launched the services by around the same time. Now in order to roll out 3G services in a particular area, a spectrum has to be allocated by the government that describes the frequency range of the radio waves.
Till date, only BSNL and MTNL have been allotted spectrum blocks in the 2.1 GHz band and have launched the 3G Mobile Services in India with their private competitors waiting for the spectrum auction to commence. MTNL were the first service providers to have launched 3G services in Mumbai & Delhi following which On 2 March’09 BSNL launched the services simultaneously in 12 cities.
The private vendors on the other side are still waiting for the spectrum auction. As I said in my last post, initially, conflicts between the Telecom industry and the Finance Sector in fixing the Reserve Price delayed the auction but when that was resolved, the Government came up with another reason to delay the auction saying Global Recession would result in lower bid amounts and set the next proposed date for auction as January’2010.
Even after the elections this year, the Communications Minister has no hesitation in implying that 3G Auction is a priority but yet its just getting more and more delayed. On July 13th 2009, the Government finally formed an 8 member Empowered Group of Ministers to look into auction and pricing of the 3G spectrum auction. The first meeting of the EGoM is scheduled to be on 31st July where decision is going to be made as to the number of slots that is going to be auctioned in the first phase.
After so many delays, the question that comes to my mind is whether the Government is really serious about launching 3G services? The series of events from 2005 till date doesn’t suggest so. The spectrum auctioning has been a very slow process and now one can only hope that services are rolled out soon enough and the Government sticks to its deadline this time.
Govt. is always concerned about their vote bank. This time one party got majority so they doubled the auction base price. Please understand its India, politics first then monetary benefit then work.
They have to do this task before 2010 Budget as they have to show they tried lot to bring down fiscal deficit numbers. I have learnt from one online news portal that communication department said 2G is for “Aam – Aadmi” so no auction and 3G is for “Bade – Aadmi” so big auction but they should understand first “Bade – Aadmi” pays huge tax compare to “Aam – Admi”.
I don’t understand why it’s delayed since 2005