Indian telco Airtel paid highest revenue in Q3

www.WirelessFederation.com/news: Highest revenue, both in terms of spectrum charges and license fees has been paid by the country’s largest private telecom operator, Bharti Airtel to the government for the quarter ending December 2009.

Bharti paid Rs 570.17 crore as license fees and Rs 301.49 crore as the spectrum charge for the third quarter ended December 2009. The data has been compiled by telecom regulator TRAI. 2.85 million new user has been added by Bharti in December.

It has been always debated that GSM operators (like Bharti and Vodafone) have been paying hefty spectrum charges compared with CDMA players (like Reliance Communications and Tata Teleservices). It has been claimed by the GSM operators that they are being charged much higher for every unit of spectrum usage.

According to the TRAI figures, Bharti paid Rs 871.66 crore as license fees and spectrum charges together for the Q3 while RCom and TTSL together paid only Rs 401.81 crore for the October -December period.