Budget 2018-19

  The telecom department had issued demand notes to the three operators on March 8, and the deadline for making the upfront payment was Thursday Reliance Jio, Bharti Airtel, and Vodafone Idea on Thursday made upfront payments for the spectrum bought in the recently concluded auctions. It is learnt that while Reliance Jio has made a payment of Rs 15,019 crore, Bharti Airtel and Vi paid Rs 6,323 crore and Rs 574 crore, respectively. The  telecom department  had issued demand notes to the three operators on March 8, and the deadline for making the upfront payment was Thursday. Reliance Jio emerged the highest bidder in the 4G telecom spectrum auction, beating incumbents Bharti Airtel and Vodafone Idea by a wide margin. The Centre would get Rs 77,815 crore from the two-day auction — one of the shortest in a decade. While the amount has exceeded the government expectation, the total mop-up is far below the Rs 3.92 trillion worth of airwaves put up for sale. The spectrum has be...

The investment required to serve Asia’s third-biggest population spread across 6,000 inhabited islands – out of a total of at least 17,000 isles and atolls – is already large “It’s time for us to work from home, learn from home, worship at home,” Indonesia’s president announced in the early days of the pandemic in March. What Joko Widodo couldn’t have known back then was how social distancing would bring rivals in the country’s competitive telecommunications industry closer together. Credit for consolidation must go where it’s due: to the sprawling geography of the world’s largest archipelago. The investment required to serve Asia’s third-biggest population spread across 6,000 inhabited islands — out of a total of at least 17,000 isles and atolls — is already large. But with 197 million Internet users spending more time at home guzzling data, it’s pointless and wasteful for five mobile operators to seek to duplicate expensive infrastructure in a nation stretching from the Pacific Ocean...