5G Spectrum Auction: Reliance Jio was the top bidder to the airwaves.
New Delhi:
India’s biggest ever auction of airwaves ended today, with a record of over Rs 1.5 lakh crore worth of spectrum being sold, According news agency Press Trust of India. Mukesh Ambani’s Jio emerged as the top bidder to consolidate its leadership position.
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The provisional figure for the sale proceeds is Rs 1,50,173 crore and the final numbers are being tallied, according to reports.
The auction stretched into seven days and ended this afternoon.
The mop-up from the 5G spectrum, capable of offering ultra-high speed mobile internet connectivity, is almost double at Rs 77,815 crore worth 4G airwaves sold last year and triple of Rs 50,968.37 crore garnered from a 3G auction in 2010.
Reliance Jio was the top bidder to the airwaves capable of offering speeds about 10 times faster than 4G, lag-free connectivity, and can enable billions of connected devices to share data in real-time.
It was followed by Bharti Airtel and Vodafone Idea Ltd.
New entrant Adani group is said to have bought 26 Mhz spectrum for setting up a private telecom network.
Both Bharti and Jio have likely built a pan-India spectrum footprint for 5G, with Vodafone Idea’s selective participation.
The government had put on offer spectrum in 10 bands but received no bids for airwaves in 600 MHz, 800 MHz and 2300 MHz bands.
About two-thirds of the bids were for the 5G bands (3300 Mhz and 26 GHz), while more than a quarter of the demand came in the 700 Mhz band – a band that had gone unsold in the previous two auctions (2016 and 2021).
The auction garnered bids worth Rs 1.45 lakh crore on the first day on July 26, with subsequent days seeing only marginal incremental demand in some circles.
