The country's largest private telecom operator, Bharti Airtel, paid the highest revenue, both in terms of spectrum charges and licence fees, to the government for the quarter ending December 2009.
As per the data compiled by telecom regulator TRAI, Bharti paid Rs 570.17 crore (Rs 5.701 billion) as licence fees and Rs 301.49 crore (Rs 3.014 billion) as the spectrum charge for the third quarter ended December 2009.
Bharti had added 2.85 million new user in December. There has been constant debate among the incumbent GSM operators (like Bharti and Vodafone) and CDMA players (like Reliance Communications and Tata Teleservices) that the former set of players were paying hefty spectrum charges compared with others.
The GSM operators claim that they are being charged much higher for every unit of spectrum usage.
Going by TRAI's figures, Bharti's total outgo on licence fees and spectrum charges together for the Q3 was more than double the amount paid by the two leading CDMA players RCom and TTSL together.
Bharti paid Rs 871.66 crore (Rs 8.716 billion) to the government, while RCom and TTSL together paid only Rs 401.81 crore (Rs 4.018 billion) for the October -December period.
Tata Teleservices, which was the biggest grosser in the wireless space in December by adding a hefty 3.33 million new subscribers, has paid Rs 133.12 crore (Rs 1.331 billion) as licence fee and Rs 39.45 as spectrum charges to the government in the same quarter.
RCom has paid a licence fee of Rs 186.23 crore (Rs 1.862 billion) and spectrum charge of Rs 43.01 crore (Rs 4.301 billion).
The two telecom PSUs BSNL and MTNL together have paid (excluding the charges paid towards basic mobile phone services) Rs 261.59 crore (Rs 2.615 billion) during the quarter under consideration.
BSNL and MTNL had added 2.08 million and 0.06 million users respectively in the December.
Out of the new players, Unitech Wireless, which launched its services in the last quarter of 2009 has paid Rs 2.94 crore (Rs 29. 4 million) only towards licence fee and spectrum charge to the government.
The mobile operators together added a whopping 19.10 million new subscribers in December, taking the mobile user base to 525.15 million.
