Airtel surrenders CDMA spectrum in MP to DoT

New Delhi, Oct 4 (UNI) Bharti Airtel, India's leading provider of telecommunication services, today surrendered the CDMA spectrum in the state of Madhya Pradesh to the Department of Telecommunications (DoT).

Announcing this, Bharti Airtel President Manoj Kohli said, ''The company is committed to the internationally preferred GSM technology and we have completed the process of migrating our customers from the CDMA-based WLL services to the GSM technology. We had given sufficient time to our customers for migrating to the GSM platform.'' The telecom services provider has migrated all of its customers to the GSM technology bearing all the cost of migration of such customers, he added.

Bharti Airtel had received the CDMA spectrum as part of licensing agreement in the year 1997, to offer services as applicable under the license.

After receiving the the Unified Access Service License (UASL), the telco had converted its Cellular License to UASL and the license granted in 1997 to offer fixed line services was surrendered to the DoT.

Accordingly, the company had to retain the CDMA frequency, to avoid any inconvenience to its more than 20,000 subscribers, mostly located at far-flung areas.

After allowing the use of CDMA spectrum under the UASL, the company was forced to surrender the spectrum and was also directed to pay the spectrum charges based on the combined GSM and CDMA spectrum allocated, which otherwise were to be charged separately.

In addition, its request for refund of entry fee, in view of surrender of Fixed Line License was not entertained. The company has, therefore, did not got the refund of entry fee, and was also forced to surrender the CDMA spectrum.

In the larger interest of the customers using the CDMA platform, Bharti would like to strongly appeal to the Government to clear all bottlenecks to provide additional 2G spectrum, as per the existing policy, to cater to the huge growth that Bharti Airtel is witnessing on it's GSM networks across the country.

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