TRAI holds Open House Discussion on MWA

The meeting was chaired by R.K.Arnold, Member, TRAI. 

Some of the stakeholders, who have earlier sent written comments, aired their comments and suggestions.  

Representatives from Cellullar Association of India (CAI), BhartiAirtel, Idea Cellular Ltd., Relilance Communications Ltd., Sistema Shyam Teleservices Ltd., Tata Teleservices Ltd., and Vodafone etc. amongst others presented their comments during the Open House Consultations.

The comments and counter-comments received earlier have been placed on the website of TRAI as part of its Consultation Paper dated  28March, 2014.

Most of the stakeholders substantiated and furthered their comments that they have already been submitted in written by them.

The consultation process was initiated after Department of Telecommunications requested the Authority in November, 2012 to furnish its recommendations for “Allocation and pricing of Microwave Access (MWA) and Microwave Backbone (MWB) RF carriers” in terms of clause 11(1) of the TRAI Act 1997 as amended.

TRAI has prepared this consultation paper raising specific  issues for consideration of stakeholders viz. number of microwave carriers need to be assigned to TSPs in case of 2G, 3G and BWA technologies, preferred mechanism of assignment of MWA/MWB carriers to the TSPs, i.e., ‘exclusive basis assignment’ or ‘link-to-link based assignment, administrative assignment or assignment through auction, criteria for allocation of additional carriers, pricing mechanism for carriers exploration of options for assignment of MWA carriers in all the spectrum bands in 6-42 GHz range and assignment of MWA carriers in higher frequency bands viz. E-band and V-band, the Ministry of Communications & Information Technology said in a statement.