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The Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI) on Thursday said the Department of Telecom (DoT) should take back from MTNL its entire spectrum holding in the 800 MHz band.
It said BSNL should be allowed to retain only one CDMA carrier in all the licence service areas (LSAs) except in Jammu and Kashmir, Assam and North-East LSAs, where it can retain both the carriers, TRAI said in a statement.
This was a response to the DoT’s letter dated December 12 last year, wherein it sought TRAI’s recommendations on the reserve price for 800 MHz band in all the service areas in terms of the TRAI Act.
The Authority issued its recommendations on ‘Reserve Price for Auction of Spectrum in the 800 MHz Band’ on February 22.
In its recommendations of February this year, the Authority discussed the diminishing interest in the CDMA services mainly in terms of the steady decline in the CDMA subscriber base and lower Average Revenue per User (ARPU) as compared to GSM services.
“The Authority observed that Telecom Service Providers (TSPs) in a number of countries in the Americas, Australia and Asia had deployed HSPA technology1 in this band. In the last few years, a few deployments of LTE2 and even LTE-Advanced have come up in this band,” it said.
The entire available spectrum with the DoT in the 800 MHz band should be put to auction, it added.
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