The industry body of worldwide GSM operators GSMA has said the Indian government needs to manage the precious resource of spectrum more efficiently and that freeing spectrum in 700-mhz band would be crucial for the growth of the industry.

GSMA senior director Jaikishan Rajaraman said, ?We have sufficient spectrum to be allocated in the 2,100-mhz band. It may be difficult to have spectrum in contiguous bands because of spectrum allocation on an ad hoc manner in the past, but there is no dearth of spectrum in India.?

Rajaraman opined that by just allocating 5 mhz of additional spectrum to each operator having a 3G licence will contribute about $500-billion revenue to the government over the next five years. As per a report by Analysys Mason, an increase in broadband penetration of 1% will contribute Rs 16,200 crore by 2015. Allocation of additional 5 Mhz of 3G spectrum will increase broadband penetration by 3.3% of population and, hence, enhance GDP by Rs 53,800 crore in 2015, the report highlighted.

The GSMA represents the interests of the worldwide GSM mobile industry. Its members represent more than 4.5 billion GSM and 3 GSM connections. The GSM operators in India who belong to the GSMA family give an annual fee to the association and, in turn, this industry body gives them suggestions, holds discussions and makes joint representation on various topics concerning them to the government.

Almost all major GSM carriers are already facing spectrum congestion in the metros for offering basic voice services, and do not have network capacity to offer EDGE-based data services. With the allocation of 3G and BWA spectrum, some of the voice congestion will get relieved and operators will have spare capacity to offer data services. However, 3G spectrum allocation is only 5 MHz and will only be able to support limited number of wireless broadband users as some will be used to solve the voice congestion issues.

As a solution to this issue he suggested that freeing spectrum in 700-mhz band was important for the growth of telephony in India. ?Spectrum in this 700-mhz band is of superior quality and the US is about to launch LTE on this band.

This band in India is largely unoccupied. The issue is how quickly government can vacate this band which now carries analog television signals and harness it for mobile communication,? he added.