Last day of submitting application for 3G and broadband wireless access spectrum saw action early morning when Idea Cellular submitted application. It was soon followed by  Aircel and S Tel. Reliance Communications (RCOM) and Bharti were other companies who submitted applications for BWA. Yesterday they submitted applications for 3G spectrum.

Idea and Aircel submitted applications for both BWA and 3G.

On Thursday, Bharti Airtel, Vodafone, Tata Teleservices and Etisalat DB (formerly Swan) submitted applications for 3G, while Tata Communications, Vodafone, Tikona, Qualcomm filed applications for BWA.

Videocon, Uninor, Local Loop (Essar-owned company) and MTS are among the existing telecom service providers/potential providers who have not submitted application for 3G or BWA spectrum.

So the picture that is emerging is that all the leading GSM service providers who have submitted applications for 3G have also bid for BWA.

Consequently, the number of bidders for BWA is more than that for 3G. This is expected to give an interesting turn to the whole bidding.

“It seems that BWA will now be cornered by the LTE players which was not the initial intention, neither of the government nor of the operators,” told Ravi Sharma, former head of Alcatel Lucent (South Asia) and CEO of Videocon (now Datacom), to TelecomTiger.