Posts Tagged ‘Delhi’

Contrary to the telecom operators’ contention that the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India’s (Trai’s) recommendations – hiking the reserve price for the auction of 2G spectrum – will make it prohibitive to operate, an analysis of the recommendation shows that the service providers stand to gain under the new regime over the long run if they have to pay the reserve price for the spectrum.

That’s because while Trai’s recommendations enhance the spectrum fee, they also drastically reduce the proportion of revenues (to a uniform level of 1% as against the existing 3% to 7% depending on how much spectrum an operator uses) that the operators have to give to the government as user charges. Airtel, Vodafone, Idea Cellular and Reliance Infocom will gain Rs 1,20,000 crore in the next 20 years in the circles where old licences will expire between 2014 and 2016, provided their revenues grow at a conservative 12% per annum.

As the revenues earned by mobile phone operators run into tens of thousands of crores, any drop in the sharing of the revenue leads to huge savings. Take the case of Airtel, the country’s largest mobile operator. Its 20-year licences to operate 2G services will expire by 2016 in nine circles – Delhi, Kolkata and Tamil nadu in 2014, Andhra Pradesh, HP, North East and Punjab in 2015 and Karnataka and Rajasthan in 2016.

Sandeep Ladda, telecom consultant with PWC, while refusing to comment on TOI’s calculation of savings under the new licence regime, said the new scheme is regressive as it will help only the established players. It will discourage new players from entering the telecom business as the licence fees are very high. Till an operator generates huge revenues and acquires a large user base, there is no offsetting benefit and hence business becomes unsustainable. The new policy will kill competition, he said.

Under the existing norms, Airtel pays an average of 5.8% of its adjusted revenue, which is 76% of the total revenue of Rs 23,690 crore, as spectrum usage charge in these nine circles. The remaining 24% of Airtel’s revenue is from other income including sales of handsets. Under the new regime, it will have to pay only 1% of the adjusted revenue as the spectrum usage charge. This leads to a savings of Rs 1,208 crore in the first year itself under the new regime, provided its revenue continues to grow at 12%.

Over 20 years, the operator would save Rs 87,065 crore under these assumptions. At the same time, the company will have to pay Rs 19,838 crore towards licence fees, if it gets the spectrum at the reserve price.

Bharti Airtel is in advanced discussions with US chipmaker Qualcomm to buy its fourth-generation licences for about Rs 6,000 crore, an acquisition that will allow the country’s largest telecom firm to quickly launch 4G services in the key markets of Delhi and Mumbai.

A person familiar with the development said the deal is likely to be closed by June and will be accompanied by technology agreements between Qualcomm and Bharti. Fourth-generation, or 4G, services offer users Internet access at three times the speed of 3G and require broadband airwaves.

Qualcomm, which had won airwaves in four regions – Mumbai, Delhi, Haryana and Kerala – in the broadband wireless auction of 2010 for Rs 4,900 crore, had begun talks to sell its 74% stake in its Indian joint venture to Bharti later that year.

But the talks were put on hold after the telecom department cancelled the US chipmaker’s mobile broadband permits last year on the grounds that it had not applied for licences within three months of the auction.

These telecom vendors are working in almost every  states/circles in india , in which gurgaon, noida, delhi, ambala, banglore, chandigarh , delhi , mumbai, hyderabad , chennai, karnataka, kolkata , orissa are the major location from where they operate.

List of Top Telecom / Telecommunication Vendor Companies  in India

1)Nokia Siemens Networks.

2) Huawei

3) Ericsson

4) ZTE

5) Alcatel – Lucent

6) Ceragon Networks

7) Juniper Networks

8)Tejas Networks

9) NEC

10) Cisco

12) Avaya

13) Nortel

14) GTL

List of top 30 Telecom companies in India :

Reliance Communications plans to launch 3G by year-end

Reliance Communications, plans to launch  3G service by end of the year.According to Mr. Syed Safawi, Head of Wireless Business, Reliance Communications, the company expects to be in the 3G market by end of the year.

RCOM has 13 circles including the metros of Delhi, Mumbai and Kolkata and is the only operator without capacity constraints on 2G in these circles.

Reliance Communications, Bharti Airtel and Aircel have won the largest number of 13 circles each in the auction of airwaves for third generation (3G) telecom services, and will collectively pay the government 27,379.96 crore ($6.08 billion).

Qualcomm, Ericsson demo LTE TDD in India

Qualcomm and Ericsson have demonstrated LTE Time Division Duplex (TDD) mobility in India, including the ability to hand off calls between basestations.

The demonstration streamed multiple, live HD video feeds to a mobile van, showing the ability to hand off between basestations while maintaining session continuity.  The partners used Ericsson’s Radio Access Network and Evolved Packet Core technologies and USB dongles based on Qualcomm’s MDM9x00 multimode chip set that supports both LTE and 3G

”We are pleased to have collaborated with Ericsson on this demonstration showcasing LTE-TDD mobility in an outdoor environment in India,” said Kanwalinder Singh, president of Qualcomm India and South Asia and senior vice-president of Qualcomm.

The demonstration is significant as Qualcomm recently paid $1 billion in the India BWA auction for a 20 megahertz TDD spectrum license in the 2.3 GHz spectrum band covering Delhi, Mumbai, Haryana and Kerala, India. As part of that win, Qualcomm formed a joint venture under the India LTE Venture name to move forward with building out a mobile network using the spectrum.

About LTE

LTE is a next generation broadband technology that offers speeds of 7-10 Mbps

3GPP Long Term Evolution (LTE), is the latest standard in the mobile network technology tree that produced the GSM/EDGE and UMTS/HSxPA network technologies.  It is a project of the 3rd Generation Partnership Project (3GPP), operating under a name trademarked by one of the associations within the partnership, the European Telecommunications Standards Institute.

The current generation of mobile telecommunication networks are collectively known as 3G (for “third generation”). Although LTE is often marketed as 4G, first-release LTE does not fully comply with the IMT Advanced 4G requirements. The pre-4G standard is a step toward LTE Advanced, a 4th generation standard (4G) of radio technologies designed to increase the capacity and speed of mobile telephone networks. LTE Advanced is backwards compatible with LTE and uses the same frequency bands, while LTE is not backwards compatible with 3G systems.