The Association of Unified Service Providers of India (AUSPI) has lashed back at Vodafone Essar over the latter’s proposal to DoT regarding spectrum charges.

According to AUSPI, Vodafone’s proposal to club CDMA and GSM spectrum for dual tech players is an attempt to confuse matters as it is known that the two technologies and their ecosystems are completely separate and the two spectrums cannot be combined for use.

“Vodafone’s comparison of spectrum holding by combining CDMA and GSM spectrum is totally illogical, unscientific and irrational as GSM and CDMA technologies can work only in their respective spectrum band because of absence of ecosystem.  Vodafone’s submission regarding use of 800 MHz  spectrum band for GSM technology is irrelevant as there is no supporting ecosystem and does not prove that CDMA and GSM spectrum can be combined,” says AUSPI in a letter addressed to Telecom Secretary, P J Thomas.

The industry lobby also claimed that dual tech players had to incur higher capex for running two separate networks for GSM and CDMA networks. On the contrary, Vodafone saved significant capex as high as $ 2 billion due to trunking efficiency possible because of excess spectrum held by it.  

AUSPI charged that Vodafone had chosen to selectively quote from DOT Affidavit claiming everything is in order related to excess spectrum held by it.

On The issue of higher payments by incumbent GSM operators to the government, AUSPI apart from pointing out that these operators where in operations for almost 15 years now also sought attention to the fact that incumbent operators had themselves negotiated with the government to move from a fixed annual fee regime to revenue sharing structure.

“Uniform spectrum fee will create a non-level playing field between new and established operators and result in the killing of competition and driving new entrants out of the market,” argues AUSPI over proposal from incumbent operators to move back to a fixed fee regime now.

AUSPI demanded that the DoT should spectrum usage charges for spectrum holding beyond 6.2 MHz should be steeply increased to encourage efficient utilization of spectrum, withdraw excess spectrum allocated to Vodafone and few other incumbent service providers to align that with the licensing condition and reject the demand for flat spectrum charges till spectrum holding is equalized amongst all players.