June 27: Indias Bharti Airtel has spent 68.57 billion rupees ($820.80 million), the most among its peers, to acquire telecom spectrum at a government auction that ended on Wednesday, although their combined bids were well short of the amount on offer.
Overall, telecom companies bid for spectrum worth 113.40 billion rupees to acquire 141 megahertz (MHz) of airwaves, much lower than the 962.38 billion rupees worth of spectrum on offer, as was expected since firms were mainly looking to renew or shore up their holdings.
Bharti Airtel, the no.2 telecom operator by subscribers in the worlds second-largest smartphone market, said it bought 97 MHz spectrum that was expiring this year and acquired additional spectrum to boost its mid-band holding, commonly used for 5G connectivity.
Reliance Industries unit Reliance Jio Infocomm, the top operator in the country, bought spectrum worth 9.74 billion rupees, while Vodafone Idea bought spectrum worth 35.1 billion rupees.
This years auction was expected to be limited in scale compared with the last one in 2022 when 51.2 GHz of radio frequencies were sold for a record 1.5 trillion rupees, mainly as the 5G spectrum was on auction for the first time. —Reuters
