The Department of Telecom (DoT) on Tuesday issued spectrum trading guidelines that allow telecom operators to procure radiowaves for mobile services from other companies to meet their requirements and improve service quality.
“The government has now decided to allow trading of access spectrum as per guidelines,” an official paper said.
This will help some of the loss making firms as they can exit from the business by selling their radiowaves to big companies.
Earlier, telecom operators had the only option to procure airwaves through an auction conducted by the Department of Telecom as per its own schedule.
As per the guidelines, a telecom operator can sell the right to use spectrum to another operator either in part or full holding at the level of telecom circle.
“All access spectrum bands earmarked for access services by the licensor (DoT) will be treated as tradable spectrum bands,” the guidelines said.
The guidelines restricted trading to presently allocated frequencies in 800 Mhz (being used for CDMA mobile services), 900 Mhz (2G and 3G), 1800 Mhz (2G and 4G), 2100 Mhz (3G), 2300 Mhz (4G) and 2500 Mhz (4G).
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