Nigeria Communications Commission (NCC) has today in Lagos unveiled steps aimed at auctioning 2.6 GHz spectrum band for intending bidders.
NCC’s Director of Spectrum Administration, Engr. Austin Nwaulune said that “Pre-qualification is key to this issue because some people felt that they are not suppose to participate because they are not Nigerian but there is no such provision. What we have in the IM is that the conditions to pre-qualify are about three conditions.
Our correspondent gathered that the applicant must company registered in Nigeria with the Corporate Affairs Commission (CAC) meaning that any company can participate in the auction from any part of the world. Foreign companies can come to Nigeria, register the company with the CAC and it becomes a Nigerian company. The company must be independent and the company who has more than 10 per cent stake in another company can’t be bidding while the other company is bidding. It is forbidden for companies that have such relationship to participate. One of them has to participate while other should drop out. The third requirement is what we call intention to bid deposit like bid guarantee that if you participate in this auction, you are saying at the least that you are ready to pay the price that we have declared as the reserve price if the process does not go into an auction. The process will not go into auction if we receive application that the aggregate demand is less than or equal to 14. It means those people who apply will provisionally win at the reserve price but if the application is more than 14, we have to go into an auction to determine the people that will win it. We have 14 slots to license and if when the application are received, we check the number of slots that applicants applied for and they are not more than 14 (14 or less), then everyone who have applied would be deemed to have qualified as what they applied for. But if we have request for 15 Lots, then an auction must hold on May 16th. The fourth condition to qualify is limited to licensed operators. No matter the category of license that you hold, if you have to participate in this process you must not be indebted to the Commission at all. If you are indebted then you are not qualified to participate.”
He also noted that the nature of the auction is such that it is a transparent process and everything that we do is fair and equity is imbibed. That is why the Information Memorandum (IM) is packaged so that anybody who is getting any information is getting uniform information to ensure that nobody is advantaged or disadvantaged hence the same thing we are telling one is what we tell all. Even when people ask questions, we have put it in the Information Memorandum (IM) so that answers to the questions will be compiled but no mention would be made of whoever asks the question with uniform information passed to everybody. The IM is the basis of all sorts of information.”
IT NEWS NIGERIA learned that NCC has a spectrum frequency that sometimes people call 2.5 GHz, sometimes they call it 2.6 GHz, at times others call it 2.7 GHz. Reason is that the spectrum spans from 2.5 to 2.7 GHz. But we have chosen in Nigeria and in this Information Memorandum (IM) to call it 2.6 GHz as a standard so that is what we use.
