State-run Bharat Sanchar Nigam Ltd has applied to launch nationwide mobile telecom services on the CDMA platform, the telecoms minister said in a statement in Parliament on Monday.
Putting at rest the controversy over issuance of new telecom licenses on 575 applications, the government on Monday said in the Lok Sabha that these would be issued as per the existing policy which does not put any restriction on the number of operators.
At a time when GSM operators such as Airtel, Vodafone and Idea are protesting new spectrum allocation norms, Reliance Communication Chairman Anil Ambani is understood to have told an official committee that the new rules were a tamed version of the draft. Mr. Ambani further alleged that if spectrum was not available, how did the GSM operators manage to add 52 million subscribers within the past 3 quarters without any spectrum allocation ?
