In the past few months, I have written many articles on the satellite spectrum — how it is different from its terrestrial and the pros and cons of following each of the assignment strategies — auction or administrative. On the current note, I plan to cut to the chase by analyzing what compromise the DoT has to make in case it decides to pick one of the two alternatives.
Terrestrial Spectrum
Auction is nothing but the sale of the capacity to carry data. Now in a conventional auction like 5G, the capacity is created by slicing the total available spectrum into various block sizes and each block is assigned individually to winners for exclusive use. The size of these blocks and the total number assigned to the winners remain constant and do not change during the period of the license. And the blocks remaining unsold are put up for auction by DOT subsequently to new players.
