The Department of Telecom (DoT) on Friday invited bids to select an agency to conduct e-auctioning of spectrum in various bands of telecom airwaves. The department issued a notice for ‘Request of Proposal for the selection of an agency to conduct e-auction of spectrum’ on simultaneous multiple-round ascending auction (SMRA) pattern in the 22 telecom service areas (TSAs).
The technical and financial bids of the interested parties should reach the department by November 19, 2014. The interested parties also have to provide an Earnest Money Deposit (EMD) of `10 lakh along with their proposal. The bids received will be evaluated in three different stages, namely, eligibility, technical and financial.
On the auctioneer’s fee, the department said in the circular, “Bidders have to quote per service area price (single quote and payable per band, separately) for holding a successful auction.”
The amount payable to the auctioneer on completion of a particular auction would be arrived at after multiplying the rate per service area with number of total service areas (counted separately for all bands) in which auction is successful, it added.
The telecommunications department will hold a pre-bid conference with interested parties on October 27, 2014. The Department of Telecom is working on modalities for next round of spectrum auction for which it needs to appoint an agency that will design software and operate whole auction process which is conducted online.
The department selects auctioneer through tender process. Earlier auctions had provision of paying fixed fee of Rs 5 crore along with variable fee quoted by the auctioneer.
The 3G and BWA auctions in 2010, which jointly fetched government about Rs 1 lakh crore, were conducted by N M Rothschild & Sons. DoT shortlisted the Times Internet ltd-led consortium for auctions in 2012 which was mainly operated by Ahmedabad based firm e-Procurement Technologies.
The department collected `61,162 crore during the February 2014 auction and March 2013 auction fetched about `3,600 crore. Eight companies, including Airtel, Vodafone, Reliance Jio, Idea and Aircel participated in the auction of 900MHz (block of 45 Mhz) and 1800 MHz (block of 385MHz) band airwaves.
The 900 MHz band was auctioned only in three metros namely Delhi, Mumbai and Kolkata, whereas the 1800Mhz was offered in 22 circles.
Auction conducted in February 2014 saw huge rise in value of telecom radiowaves. Companies purchased spectrum at premium of about 100 per cent in some service areas.