Vodafone rejects RCom allegations

In a move that will result in further snowballing of the spectrum issue, British telecom major Vodafone has termed the Reliance Communications' (RCom) allegations "as false and inconsistent with the facts".

On Wednesday, Vodafone officials made a presentation to the Department of Telecommunications (DoT), in which it said that RCom was "cherry picking examples with an agenda to mislead".

Vodafone also stated that it has studied spectrum allocations in 40 countries covering 142 GSM operators for making the presentation.

Stating that GSM operators were not constrained to 10 MHz of spectrum as claimed by RCom, Vodafone cited the examples "� in Manhattan, AT&T Wireless was allocated spectrum of 22.5 MHz and T-Mobile 15 MHz.

Similarly, in Hong Kong, no operator has less than 11.6 MHz and leading players were provided 19.8 MHz. In Greece, Vodafone has recently received increased spectrum of 30 MHz from the earlier 10 MHz.

Vodafone was countering an earlier statement made by RCom that there were many examples of "operators in the US and Hong Kong with lesser spectrum serving markets with higher density".

Taking on RCom's argument that there were many cities operating with much higher site densities, Vodafone stated that this was "unsubstantiated and inconsistent" with the facts.

The presentation made by the Vodafone Group (UK) R&D department also said that RCom was determining quality of services based on averaged reports, which would have no relevance in determining quality in congested areas.

On spectral-efficient technologies suggested by Anil Ambani, Vodafone said that potential gains from these technologies "will be small, if any".

Ambani has suggested usage of adaptive modulation rate (AMR), single antenna interference cancellation (SAIC), dynamic frequency & channel allocation (DFCA) and in-building solutions among others for increasing spectral efficiency in the country.