Financial Freedom

New Delhi: The telecom ministry has brought Sunil Bharti Mittal, India’s sixth richest man and owner of India’s leading mobile firm Bharti Airtel, which boasts of over 50 million subscribers batting for the GSM players on account of a painful squeezing of subscriber-linked thresholds for spectrum allocation.
Mittal on Thursday, wrote to telecom secretary D S Mathur expressing anguish over the TEC report on Wednesday. “If one was to assume the TEC recommendations have any weight, then the start up spectrum for new operators should be a fraction of the proposed 4.4 MHz, given that Bharti is serving 50 million customers with an average spectrum of less than 8 MHz,” he writes.
While Mittal says he has no difficulty in accepting that operators must be spectrum efficient, he says he cannot see why BSNL and MTNL, which have lower subscribers than Airtel, have been given spectrum despite their not meeting the subscriber norms.
Mittal has urged DoT to “demonstrate and guide the industry for efficient spectrum use by immediately withdrawing a large part of spectrum from MTNL in Mumbai and Delhi and then run an efficient, high quality network meeting all the quality of service parameters laid out by Trai and show the way to the world how best to manage spectrum without compromising the customers interest”.
“This to my mind, will go a long way in establishing your department’s expertise on the matter, which we in the private sector and the operators the world over have not been able to figure out,” he adds. Mittal has further asked the DoT not to issue any fresh spectrum that compromises the rights of the existing operators.
Why BSNL and MTNL have been given more spectrum, asks Mittal