THREE OTHERS GET BWA SPETRUM,INFOTEL

NEW DELHI: Government on Wednesday allotted spectrum to four operators, including RIL-owned Infotel, in all 22 circles and Bharti Airtel in four, paving the way for starting high-speed mobile broadband.

According to senior officials in DoT 20 Mhz of spectrum has been given to the four firms — Infotel, Bharti, Aircel and Tikona Digital, which have licences to offer services.

The other two — Qualcom and Augere (Mauritius) Limited — would be given the radio waves as soon as they procure telecom licences, they said, adding there is no other problem with their cases. The government had recently held auction for selling spectrum for 3G and Broadband Wireless Access (BWA) services and had collected over Rs 1,06,262 crore.

With the BWA, the operators can offer broadband services that can facilitate high-speed wireless transmission of data. The speed can be as high as up to 40 Mbps. The operators have started talks with the telecom vendors like Samsung, Motorola, Ericsson and firms like Huawei and ZTE for deploying either Wimax or LTE platform.