The Pakistan Telecommunication Authority, under the policy directive for auction of Spectrum for NGMS has started taking applications from the interested Pakistani and foreign applicants for 10 MHz of spectrum in the 1800 MHz band for technology neutral 3G/4G services across Pakistan.
The Information Memorandum for Next Generation Mobile Services Award 2017 invites interested parties to submit their applications by April 30, to be part of this auction which will happen on May 16, this year.
This is the last available spectrum block from the initially allocated spectrum in 2014. Government of Pakistan has already earned $1.1 billion from 3G/4G auction in first phase and later got $395 million from Telenor for the 4G license.
This License will cost $295 if There’s no bidding:
Base price for the 10 MHz paired spectrum as a single block will be $295 million and it will be technology neutral and usable for all Next Generation Mobile Services (including 3G/4G and advanced generations). The tenure of frequency assignment is 15 years; however, the service provider should maintain quality of service.
- Stage-1 of Auction (Pre-qualification Stage Including a Pre-Bid Offer)
- Stage- 2 of Auction: In this stage, if only one application is received from bidder, PTA will award the spectrum rights to the qualified Applicant directly on the base price
Ufone’s only chance to get 4G License:
It is worth noting that at this point, Ufone is the only telecom operator not having a 4G license. So it is likely that Ufone will go for this Spectrum, however a new entrant might grab this opportunity as well. In any other scenario the two leading telecom operators, Jazz and Zong could also get this block to enhance their capacity.
More details on this topic could be found on PTA’s official website.
