The government today held mock auction for 3G spectrum and has convened a meeting tomorrow in which the bidders will be briefed about the nittty gritties of the real auction on Friday.
The Department of Telecom (DoT) conducted the mock auction to familiarise the nine 3G and 11 broadband wireless access (BWA) bidders with the system and clarify their technical queries about the auction.
Bidders logged onto the DoT's mock auction network since morning to understand the nitty gritties.
According to a senior DoT offcial, NM Rothschild, which designed the auction process, will make a presentation to the bidders in tomorrow's meeting.
Finance Secretary Ashok Chawla, Home Secretary G K Pillai among others, have been invited for the meeting.
Trai Chairman J S Sarma, HDFC Chairman Deepak Parekh, Pratyush Sinha, CVC, and Sam Pitroda, Advisor, infrastructure to the Prime Minister are the other invitees.
DoT Member (finance) Vijaylaxmi Gupta will chair the meeting. Telecom Secretary P J Thomas and a host of officials from the department will also attend.
Nine telecom companies are in the final list of bidders for three-four slots of 5MHz of 3G spectrum, while there are 11 bidders for two slots of BWA. Winners will be able to offer customers high-speed voice and data transfer and multimedia services.
The process of e-auction allows applicants to bid from their computers.
Nine applicants including Bharti Airtel, Vodafone Essar, Reliance Telecom and Idea Cellula, and 11 applicants for BWA have qualified to take part in the auction. Government hopes to collect about Rs 30-Rs 35,000 from the auction of the radiowaves. The reserve price for a pan-India 3G licence is Rs 3500 crore while that of BWA is Rs 1,750 crore.
The government is likely to get billion dollar bids for all India 3G licenses.
