Please show us the way: Mittal to DoT

Even as the government today accepted the Telecommunication Engineering Centre (TEC) report on additional allocation of spectrum to existing operators, Bharti Airtel chairman termed the report as "absurd" and an outcome of a "hurried exercise".

In a letter written to the Department of Telecommunications (DoT) secretary, Mittal termed the TEC's proposals a "sad commentary" on how international and time tested norms for spectrum allocation were being ignored.

"If one was to assume the TEC recommendations have any weight, then the start-up spectrum for new operators should be a fraction of the proposed 4.4 MHz, given that Bharti is serving 50 million customers with an average spectrum of less than 8 MHz," Mittal said in the letter.

Attacking the state-run telecom companies BSNL and MTNL, Mittal said the government-run operators had been allocated "generous spectrum" even though they had not fulfilled the subscriber base criteria as prescribed in the current policy.

"I would like to urge you to direct the DoT to demonstrate and guide the industry for efficient spectrum use by immediately withdrawing a large part of the spectrum from MTNL and then run an efficient, high-quality network, meeting all the QoS parameters laid out by Trai," Mittal said.

Bharti has also urged the government to put into process two model networks to be run by MTNL in Delhi and Mumbai "" two areas that require the maximum spectrum due to their traffic patterns and hence need to be most spectrum efficient.

Mittal has requested the DoT, on behalf of the private telecom operators, not to allocate any spectrum till the state-run MTNL becomes a model for efficient spectrum managed company.