BWA bid ends; govt to garner Rs 38,500 crore

RELATED NEWS BWA auction: Govt rev at Rs 38,324cr on Day 15 All-India BWA bid price at Rs 12,257.3cr on day 14

INDIA'S WIRELESS broadband spectrum auction (BWA) ended on Friday after 16 days of bidding, sources said to CNBC-TV18's Siddarth Zarabi.

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Sources close to the development said that the last bid for the spectrum allocation ended at Rs 12890 crore while the government is expected to garner Rs 38,500 crore.

It is learnt that three telecom majors Idea Cellular , Reliance Communications and Vodafone have opted out of the race. Info Tel Broadband has won bid for all the 22 circles.

The revenue generated by the BWA auction is far lesser than what the 3G had fetched. However the real issue is that the revenue from BWA auction will not start flowing in at least six to eight quarters because the network architecture is still not in place.

Yesterday one of the standards of Wimax was approved internationally. So this is clearly going to be the holding strategy where all the companies that have won the spectrum allocation will try to match the Wimax conditions. That perhaps explains why companies like Idea dropped out of the bid.

So the question of viability remains as far as the broadband allocation is concerned.

List of the winners

Telecom Operator	Number of circles
Info Tel Broadband	22
Aircel	8
Bharti	4
Qualcomm	4
Tikona	5
Augere	1