The final winner of the 5G spectrum auction was disclosed yesterday, with Mukesh Ambani’s Reliance Jio emerging as the top bidder. The bid for the rights to provide 5G services in India closed yesterday, with the telecom giant making a final payment.
The auction of the 5G spectrum begins on Wednesday and will end on Monday. The auction, managed by the telecom department of the ministry of communications and IT, is the third-highest in the world and second-highest in Europe. The spectrum auction is the fourth in the country and the first to be born on a nondiscriminatory basis.
The 7-day auction saw 3.55 lakh mobile phones and Rs 1,390 crore of non-mobile devices sold. The auction saw the company clinching the top spot with a record-breaking 1.5 lakh crore spectrum in bids on offer.
Sources with direct information regarding this situation said a temporary report puts the complete offers at Rs 1,50,173 crore. The public authority has figured out how to collect an incredible Rs. 50,968.37 crores from a 3G closeout in 2010.
The auction for the 5G spectrum has ended, and Reliance Jio was the top bidder. It is a boon to the company as it will be able to offer a plethora of services. The company also outbid Bharti Airtel by a mere 1.5 bn dollars. Jio has said it will roll out network services across the country in the next few months. It has also said that it will continue to look for more spectrum for the company. The 4G Spectrum auction was successful, as the company said.
After the 5G spectrum auction was born to address the spectrum shortage for the upcoming 5G services, the Indian telecom sector, and the government is now looking for companies that have bought the range. Sources said the auction did not leave any room for new entrants in the telecom sector. The government is now looking at the Adani Group, which bought the 26 MHz spectrum, as the recent entrant.
After a competitive auction that concluded today, both Bharti Airtel and Reliance Jio were able to build out a pan-India spectrum footprint for 5G. Bharti Airtel will likely have a lead in the pan-India spectrum footprint, with Jio likely to have a leader in the urban spectrum footprint.
The government offered spectrum in 10 bands but received no bids for airwaves in the 600 MHz, 800 MHz, and 2300 MHz bands. About two-thirds of the demand came in the 5G bands (3300 Mhz and 26 GHz), while more than a quarter came from the 700 Mhz band – a band that had gone unsold in previous auctions (2016 and 2021).
Last year, Reliance Jio won a bid for spectrum worth Rs 57,122.65 crore, Bharti Airtel bid about Rs 18,699 crore, and Vodafone Idea bought scope worth Rs 1,993.40 crore in an auction.
This year, Indian telecom regulator TRAI held auctions for 72 GHz radiowaves worth at least Rs 4.3 crore. The auction was for spectrum in various low (600 MHz, 700 MHz, 800 MHz, 900 MHz, 1800 MHz, 2100 MHz, 2300 MHz), mid (3300 MHz), and high (26 GHz) frequency bands.
5G would use to power ultra-low latency connections, which allow downloading full-length high-quality video or movie to a mobile device in a matter of seconds (even in crowded areas).
The first day of the auction drew bids worth Rs 1.45 lakh crore on July 26, with subsequent days seeing only marginal incremental demand in some circles.
