This was to be expected. The spectrum issues played out in the past fortnight in full public glare. I was following up the story in the mainstream press and this makes for a fascinating read; specially the way it brings the “saas bahu” serials to shame. It gave enough grist to the “telecom” specialists to throw their hats in the rings and make lofty pronouncements.

A quick low down of the ensuing events. According to the norms, the spectrum would be issued to the companies who garner the maximum share of the subscribers. This means that apart from the bloated number of subscribers, the whole mobile user base is a BIG suspect. The specturm wars broke out in the public because Raja wanted to ration the scarce resource and act God. There are often shispers of BIG money floating around but then that isn’t the focus of this write up here. At first, the government decided to relax the norms for spectrum allocation. In the meantime, it allocated 10 Mhz of “free” spectrum to the two upgly sisters, BSNL/MTNL. This was challanged by COAI, the motley coalition of the private telecom operators in TDSAT, which is tribunal body to decide the disputes. To add to the confusion in the midst was the huge number of applications that waited to get their turn for spectrum allocation. DoT decided to issue letters of intent to the new players.

In the meantime, the media jumped in the fray and raised the issue of 3G licences and there were various interpretations of the original licencing norms. Government of India thrives in controversy and no wonder that it was very happy to roll in the mud. The motley association was split right through the middle and they could not get their act quite right. After a couple of days, COAI made quiet noises about “settling” the 3G row.

Now comes the icing on the cake. Reliance got an entry in the GSM club by paying a paltry sum of 1600+crores and got their CDMA licence converted to some kind of a “universal access” crap. Whatever that means. Reliance’s entry in the cosy club and hence the scarce spectrum being gifted on the platter was too much for the association to digest. Anil Ambani and the rest exchanged verbal duels clothed in their gobbledegook. In other words, both the parties were fingering each other. When the war of words went out of hand, the DoT wanted to play Godfather and summoned the chiefs of all the telecom companies to “thrash out a solution”.

Raja realised that the game was clearly up and set up a shadow boxing competition. In effect, to announce as to who is the boss. Since there was no consensus on the telecom chief’s meet, he decided to get the PMO involved and had a smiling manmoron to back up his decision.

Thus ended the saga of the “spectrum wars”; the last word isn’t written as yet. I would wait for further news to unfold in the near future. Nevertheless, the mess persists and the ultimate looser is the public exchequer. Without going in detail about the merits of the case, I believe that this telecom mess would tangle itself like a hydra headed monster. No respite!

As usual, the watchdogs were quiet and it was only Business Standard who spoke out at length about the mess around here.

Phew!

It was coming. I have been proved wrong on very few occassions (a fact that I am proud of) and one of them was about CDMA. CDMA is an acronym for Code Division Multiple Access. This was promised to be more lucrative for the telecom service provider as it enabled them for a quicker roll out. However, the patent owner Quallcom earned a revenue from every sale of the handset making the quicker roll out far more expensive as compared to GSM.

The recent shift of Reliance and Tatas towards GSM signals a “victory” for the spin doctors of the GSM lobby. With further and incremental improvements in GSM, the so called, 3G technology promises better data transfers which was presumed to be THE advantage of CDMA over it’s GSM counterparts. Rightly so. I have seen streaming video on my old trusty Samsumg Reliance handset which was unheard off for GSM. They had a dedicated portal for the colour handsets and as early as 2003/04 it was a ‘status symbol’. They cost a cool 25k for a brand new handset.

Much has changed since then. I have opposed CDMA on the grounds that expensive royalty payments could be avoided by shifting to “open source” GSM or develop an indigenous mobile platform on lines of CDMA. The telecom companies could have easily developed a system for mutual use. The differentiation factor could have been the service levels or the value added services et al. Since we are a nation of bumbling morons, this did not happen.

Many eyebrows were raised at the way Reliance and Tatas were asked to pay up money for the new licences. The GSM lobby cried foul (rightly so for the first time) at the way these companies have been favourited. Reliance had even set up shell companies like Cheetah Telecom (can’t they think of something better?) to buy out the spectrum and hence scale up their valuation with the scarce resource.

Given the mess in this sector, it is obvious that Department of Telecom is going to play God for obvious reasons. The gold rush for the spectrum is still on and not surprisingly the GSM lobby is themselves to be blamed for. They had opposed the auctioning of spectrum when Ratan uncle had proposed this. The present mess is for all us to see.

Hence this is indeed a matter of speculation as to how this would sort itself out. We are all there to see the bloody circus out from the ring.

This is stuff straight out of a textbook on how NOT to manage assetsat your disposal. At heart of the matter is the warring Department of Telecom and other side of the fence is Ministry of Defence. Both sides are the babus with their dog eared files lablelled as “classified”. The DoT wants the spectrum to be freed and hence revenue for the Government. Ministry of Defence says that till the time it is allocated a secure systems for it’s own communication needs, it would not vacate 45 Mhz of spectrum.

Recently, members form both fixed line and CDMA clashed with the representatives of GSM lobby and blamed the present mess because of the inherent inefficiencies in the network. There was a war of words and the battle spilled over in the media. Both sides claimed spectral efficiencies and both sides were crowing about the number of their subscribers as a testimony to the fact that their side of the story was better.

Whom to believe? The nature of the arguments borders on insane and technical and I shall try and explore the issue at a later date.

Ministry of Defence invokes the holy cow of defence which means that all babus irrespective of their departments shit in their pants. No one wants to be seen as a party to be compromising on national security.

The bosses call up the media houses and I suspect that the frigging spineless bastards have a hack to take down their dictation on phone. At times, they are happy to publish the press releases as “news”. No wonder, the tone of the news painted the Defence ministry as the villian as if they are holding the “phenomenal growth” of Indian telecom to ransom. 5 million subscribers per month? Wait till the Ministry gets an idea to call for authentic numbers after the verification of subscribers. Perhaps then, we could get an adequate number in perspective.

And that would definitely puncture the fancy valuations and grandiose assholes sitting up on top of the ladder.