Reliance Jio garners chunk of 800 MHz

One of the major outcomes of the spectrum auction is that Reliance Jio has been able to win a significant amount of airwaves in the 800 MHz band. Before the auction, it was widely believed that RJio will give incumbent operators a run for their money by bidding aggressively in 900 MHz band.

Indications are that RJio did exactly that, to jack up the price of the 900 MHz band and then ended up acquiring 48 MHz in the 800 MHz frequency band.

Pan-India services RJio has also acquired spectrum in the 1,800 MHz band, which it had done in the last auction also. Now RJio has airwaves in 2,300 MHz, 1,800 MHz and 800 MHz. This should help the company to start pan-India broadband services this year. The 800 MHz band was until now being used for CDMA services but technological development now makes it ideal for high speed internet services on mobile phones. Through this acquisition, RJIL’s total equivalent spectrum footprint has increased from 597.6MHz to 751.1MHz (including uplink and downlink), strengthening its position as the largest holder of liberalised spectrum.

Mukesh Ambani, Chairman and Managing Director, Reliance Industries Limited, said, “Jio’s seamless 4G services using the proven multi-band LTE technology and supported by our large spectrum footprint will provide superior user experience for voice, video and data services in line with the best service providers in the world.”

This will make the data market very competitive with Airtel, Vodafone and Idea Cellular securing spectrum in 900 MHz band.

These three operators already own airwaves in this band and is ideally placed to leverage this band for mobile Internet.

Airtel has acquired 35 MHz of additional spectrum in the 2,100 MHz band, which should help it to get pan-India footprint.

Price paid Vodafone and Idea cellular have also picked up 30 MHz and 5 MHz respectively in this band, which is primarily used for 3G services. The three operators could not get a pan-India footprint in the auction held in 2010 so the new acquisition could plug that gap.

But the big victory for the incumbent players – Airtel, Vodafone and Idea Cellular – is that they have been able to hold on to their dominance in the 900 MHz band. However the difference between RJio and the incumbent players is the pricing. While RJio has been able to buy about 49 MHz in the 800 MHz band and another 28 MHz in the 1,800 MHz band for just over ₹10,000 crore, Airtel has to pay ₹29,130 crore for 61 MHz in the 900 MHz band and 35 MHz in the 2,100 MHz band.