Back in February 2012 the Supreme Court of India went on to cancel the 122 licenses which were held by nine companies and issued by then-Telecom Minister A.Raja.
The Court has allowed the companies to run their services until January 18th 2013 after which companies who have not been able to secure a license in the recently held auctions will have to shut down their services.
This includes Uninor, Videocon and Tata Teleservices who are in all about to lose about 10 million users as they shut down their network on January 18th. In the recent auction Norway’s Telenor which operated in India under the brand Uninor was able to secure the airwaves in 6 circles excluding Mumbai, Kolkata and West Bengal.
The company has about 7.5 million customers in these three circles and all of those will have to switch to other operators from January 18th.
Videocon also was able to only secure its licenses in only 6 circles and will have to shut down its operations in 11 circles which includes Mumbai, Maharashtra, Tamil Nadu, Kolkata, Kerala, Karnataka, Andhra Pradesh and Rajasthan. Videocon has nearly 1.7 million users in these circles.
Tata Teleservices which decided not to bid for the airwaves in the auctions has about 300,000 CDMA users in Assam, Jammu and Kashmir and the northeast will also shut down operations on January 18th.
If you are using the services of any of the three companies in the above mentioned circles it would be better to port-in your number to other operators which have their licenses intact so as to avoid inconvenience at the end moment.
