ITU-APT Foundation seeks delicensing of backhaul spectrum

ITU-APT Foundation has sought the delicensing of V band and asked to implement hybrid regulation for spectrum the in E band.

In a letter to the Department of Telecommunications (DoT) secretary Anshu Prakash dated March 2, 2021, the foundation said, “we strongly recommend that DoT should immediately delicense the V band and implement hybrid regulation of E Band (part delicensed and part light licensed) in line with other developing and developed countries.

It further said that the initiative would support innovation by engineers in line with the global ecosystem for low-cost outdoor WI-FI and fixed wireless networks based on global IEEE standards for providing high-capacity links to meet the vision of connecting all the villages with high speed broadband.

The foundation, in its letter argued that that their demand was in line with other countries, and suggested that the lower V band (57-66 GHz) should be immediately delicensed without specifying any channel bandwidth in line with relevant IEEE standards. “We further recommend that a part of the E band to be delicensed without specifying any channel bandwidth.” it added.

Delicensing of backhaul spectrum is one of the contentious issues with telecom carriers seeking auction of frequencies.

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