The Communist Party of India (Marxist) has demanded an enquiry into what it claims is a Rs 60,000 crore (Rs 600 billion) financial scam involving the manner in which 2G spectrum was allocated by the Union ministry of communications.

The one-time fee is likely to hit major telcos having spectrum above 6.2 MHz. Having drawn flak for under-pricing spectrum, the government today decided to levy a one-time charge for spectrum above 6.2 MHz in addition to the licence fees and also raised the annual usage charges. The decision was taken at a meeting attended [...]

Norway’s leading telecoms operator, is considering abandoning a $1.8bn rights issue that is supposed to fund much of its expansion into India because of investor opposition. Jon Fredrik Baksaas, Telenor’s chief executive, told the Financial Times the company was looking at alternatives to a rights issue that some shareholders had put forward.

India will allocate spectrum for next generation wireless networks to successful bidders by the end of January after holding an auction as planned earlier in the month, government officials said on Monday.

Norwegian telecoms group Telenor announced a bold move to enter the Indian mobile market through a $1.1 billion deal financed by a rights issue, sending its shares down sharply on Wednesday. Telenor, already the second-largest foreign operator in Asia after Vodafone, also reported third-quarter core profit slightly below forecast and affirmed its 2008 financial targets.

Tata Teleservices Ltd (TTSL), India’s sixth ranked mobile phone services company by customers, is working on an agreement to sell a 26% stake to NTT DoCoMo Inc., Japan’s biggest mobile phone operator, for nearly $2.5 billion (Rs12,100 crore), two people familiar with the development said.

Virgin Mobile India has also launched a campaign to promote its new tariff plan ‘New 50 paise STD local’. The television commercial is created by Bates 141. The campign is further promoted through print media and Virgin Mobile’s out-of-home (OOH) agency Poster Publicity, a unit of Group M’s Kinetic Worldwide.

Nielsen has launched a new service in India to benchmark the quality of the country’s mobile phone networks. The new service, developed with Sasken Communication Technologies, will validate the quality of mobile voice and data networks across 39 markets in India, providing call performance metrics at industry and carrier levels. It will supply data on [...]

The rollout of mobile services in rural areas is beginning to bring in the numbers for operators. Compared to a trickle of rural subscribers just a few years back, operators are now getting more than 30 per cent of their new mobile users every month from villages. While operators got 25 million new users across [...]

Spice Communications has lost nearly a million subscribers in the past two months after Idea Cellular announced the acquisition of the two-circle operator. While over 0.35 million subscribers were knocked off the books in July, another 0.63 million gave up the connection in August. With this, the subscriber base of Spice now stands at 3.56 [...]