The recently released recommendation by telecom regulator TRAI on spectrum sharing is a small but forward-looking step in India’s saga of spectrum management.

By allowing scarce spectrum to be pooled by operators (though restricted to two now), TRAI has allowed them to take advantages of spectral efficiency and trunking gain offered by larger spectrum blocks. India is the only country in the world with an extreme spectrum fragmentation and an awfully small average spectrum holding per operator in a licensed service area of 3.5-6.2 MHz in any of the 800, 900, 1,800 and 2,100 MHz bands.

With such little spectrum (compared to global norms) doled out by the Government, the recommendations are a welcome step for the industry. This fragmentation of spectrum is the cause for more towers to come up in our neighbourhood to enable more spectrum re-use and is the main reason behind the phenomenal growth of the mobile tower industry during 2004-08.

There are of course gaps in the recommendations. By restricting sharing within the respective bands (i.e. 900 MHz only with 900 MHz and not with 1800 MHz), the recommendations is only an improved version of the intra-circle roaming (ICR) guidelines released by the Department of Telecommunications (DoT) way back in 2008. What does it augur for mobile users?

The anomalies

So far, operators have been complaining that inadequate spectrum is the cause for poor coverage and pathetic quality of service. It’s only in India that you can expect a Whatsapp message to be received after, say 5 hours! Now it is time for mobile users to demand quality of service from the operators – better call clarity, no call drops, no coverage problems, and better Internet speeds.

However, there is yet another caveat!

In 2013, DoT issued guidelines on mobile tower radiation that are far more stringent than international norms. At a ceiling of 0.45 watt/ sq.mt, the permissible radiation power density levels are 1/10th of the international norms. With heavy penalties for non-compliance, the industry was caught between two swords: (i) inadequate spectrum that necessitated reuse of spectrum and hence more cell sites (ii) stringent permissible radiation levels that again reduced the cell size and hence increased reuse.

Now that spectrum can be (legally!) shared within the service area, the operators can optimise their Radio Access Network deployment including cell towers and associated antennas. With a minor 0.5 percentage increase in annual spectrum charges as proposed in its recommendations for sharing spectrum, TRAI has paved the way for optimal utilisation of spectrum resources.

Spectrum sharing

Now it is time that the operators focus on quality of service (QoS). TRAI and DoT should revise QoS metrics especially for broadband services, and penalize those who violate the norms as they have been doing for tower radiation violation using country-wide Telecom Enforcement Resources and Monitoring (TERM) cells. As a next step, TRAI and DoT should work on allowing spectrum sharing across bands. The interesting case is between operators who hold spectrum in the 2,100/2,300 MHz band and those who own 800/900/1800 MHz. The high frequency airwaves can be shared in lieu of the low frequency airwaves. High frequencies are more suitable for urban areas and sharing will ease capacity constraints in these areas by deploying 3G and 4G technologies. Lower frequencies are apt for rural areas where sharing will ease coverage constraints of the operators. By optimally mixing the sharing of different frequency blocks, one hopes that both capacity and coverage constraints of our mobile access networks will be solved in the times to come.

India is in a unique position to be a pioneer in spectrum sharing for the following reasons: (i) India has the requisite number of operators (12-15) to avoid “thinness” in spectrum sharing market (ii) initial allocation of spectrum is inefficient and insufficient and hence sharing is an avenue to promote allocative efficiency and (iii) the absolute number of mobile subscribers and the associated usage is expected to keep demand for network capacity always above supply to warrant optimal utilisation through sharing.

However, spectrum sharing needs to be transparent, unlike the 3G roaming pact episode wherein users were kept in the dark about the operators’ sharing arrangements.

The writers are with the International Institute of Information Technology Bangalore, and Management Development Institute, respectively

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