The company has decided against acquiring more spectrum, and will instead deploy more sites and invest in services in the Uttar Pradesh East, Uttar Pradesh West and Bihar telecoms circles, where it already has airwaves.
"In Punjab circles, 25 out of 92 blocks are not available in Ludhiana and Amritsar, and these are places where we are facing a little congestion, so we'd rather deploy more sites than acquiring spectrum. So it doesn't make any sense for us to bid here," said Videocon CEO Arvind Bali.
The Indian government will auction 403MHz of spectrum in the 1800MHz band and 45MHz spectrum in the 900MHz band. The 1,800MHz band is up for auction following the Supreme Court order that the government must sell all spectrum that was freed from the cancellation of 122 licences on February 2, 2012.
Bharti Airtel, Vodafone, Idea Cellular, Reliance Jio Infocomm, Uninor and Tata Teleservices have submitted applications for the auction.
India’s telecom regulator DoT amended the rules of the auction earlier this year, which includes a rule that requires winning bidders to provide details of the platform that they propose to deploy within one month of the spectrum allocation.
