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India’s latest 5G spectrum auction completed on Wednesday after seven rounds
The government collected 113.40 billion rupees ($1.35 billion) from the auction, which was far less than the total spectrum on sale, simply because demand for the spectrum is too low. The sale fell short of the 962.38 billion rupees worth of spectrum on offer.
The auction covered spectrum in the 800 MHz, 900 MHz, 1800 MHz, 2100 MHz, 2300 MHz, 2500 MHz, 3300 MHz, and 26 GHz frequency bands, but it was the 900 MHz, 1,800 MHz, 2100 MHz and 2500 MHz bands that were snapped up by the operators. “The unsold spectrum will again be put to auction next time,” confirmed the Indian Ministry of Communications.
The country’s second largest telco Bharti Airtel topped the auction spending 68.57 billion rupees ($820.80 million), followed by 35.1 billion rupees from Vodafone Idea ($420.5 million) and then market leader Reliance Jio with 9.74 billion rupees ($116.7 million).
The last spectrum auction in India took place in 2022. This auction was much larger, with 51.2 GHz of radio frequencies sold for a record 1.5 trillion rupees, mainly because much of this spectrum was on sale for the first time.
In this auction, Bharti Airtel, and Vodafone Idea all took home spectrum licences. Since then, both Jio and Airtel have been hard at work rolling out their 5G networks, while Vodafone Idea delayed the process due to financial strain.
But despite swift rollouts from the country’s two largest operators, uptake has been slow to follow, with both operators reporting relatively little in the way of 5G revenues in their latest financials, and are therefore reluctant to spend heavily on spectrum at the moment.
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