A day after Tata group chairman Ratan Tata charged GSM telecom operators of hoarding spectrum in his open letter to the Rajya Sabha MP Rajeev Chandrasekhar, the country?s third largest GSM operator, Vodafone-Essar?s CEO Marten Pieters threw the charge back at him. Pieters said that contrary to Tata?s charge, it is dual technology licensees like the latter?s firm Tata Teleservices which are hoarding spectrum.
Pieters is the first telecom industry CEO to have commented on Tata?s letter. In a telephonic interaction with FE Pieters said: ?We currently pay Rs154 crore per MHz on an average for 144 MHz spectrum, in comparison to TTSL which holds 157 MHz and pays just Rs 37 crore. Reliance Communications too pays just Rs 48 crore for a total 206 MHz of spectrum while Bharti Airtel which holds 169 MHz pays Rs 293 crore. You can clearly see that the operators who took the risk have more profitable operations and are paying equally high charge for spectrum. Hence, we haven?t cornered spectrum. It is the other way round. We got additional spectrum in accordance with the policy which said you get more spectrum when you add more users.?
Pieters? comments are significant because the one-man committee probe announced by telecom minister Kapil Sibal to look into all policies and spectrum allocation done by DoT since 2001 will have additional spectrum beyond 6.2 MHz by some of the GSM operators also as one of its terms of reference.
Companies like Bharti and Vodafone hold up to 10 MHz spectrum in some circles like Delhi and Mumbai. In his letter, Tata had said: ?The government policy entitled operators to no more than 6.2 MHz on the basis of their licence conditions. All additional spectrum should have been returned or paid for. Even Trai has recommended this in July 2010. I believe that TTSL was the only operator that returned spectrum when demanded by DoT. The CAG report clearly indicates which of the powerful GSM operators are holding spectrum beyond their entitlement free of cost and to the detriment of the other operators?.