The Indian government announces a raise in charges for radio bandwidth used by telecom operators, which will hurt the margins of operators such as Bharti Airtel Ltd. that use GSM technology.
The government expects to earn an additional $0.84 billion to $1.05 billion a year from the new levies, which includes a one-off charge of INR40 billion on telecom operators using radio frequencies of over 6.2 megahertz, said Communications Minister A. Raja.
The government will also raise the charges for radio frequencies of up to 8 Mhz by an additional 1% of telecom operators’ adjusted gross revenue and 2% more for bandwidth above that, he added.

The operators using GSM techonology, like Bharti and Idea Cellular Ltd, will be the worst hit by the new charges since they offer services at higher frequencies but won’t effect the CDMA operators like RCom.
Due to the new costs, Bharti and Idea’s operating margins will, reportedly, be hurt by 80-100 basis points this (fiscal) year.

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