Telecom firms have paid over Rs 32,400 crore to government as upfront payment for spectrum that was sold in the recently-held auction. The Department of Telecom has said that total upfront payment received by the government for spectrum auction this year is higher as compared to the last year.
DoT had set the deadline of October 20 for depositing the upfront payments for spectrum bought by operators in the auction that ended on October 6. Vodafone and Tata Teleservices had made payments of Rs 10,139 crore and Rs 2,309 crore, respectively, while five more operators, including Airtel and Reliance Jio, deposited a total of Rs 19,981 crore with DoT, taking total payments to Rs 32,400 crore so far.
The operators were required to pay 50 per cent of the bid amount upfront for spectrum bought in 1800 Mhz, 2100 Mhz, 2300 Mhz, and 2500 Mhz bands, and 25 per cent of the bid amount in the case of spectrum in bands up to 1Ghz. In all, seven operators including Bharti Airtel, Vodafone, Idea Cellular, Reliance Jio, Aircel, Reliance Communications and Tata Teleservices had placed bids of Rs 65,789 crore for 964.80 MHz of spectrum out of 2,354.55 MHz across seven bands put on offer. At the base price, total spectrum put on sale was worth Rs 5.6 lakh crore. However, the upfront payments are short of the government's target of getting Rs 64,000 crore from auction this fiscal.
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