Telenor India (Uninor)

» see telenor.in as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

On 3 December 2009 a Norwegian phone company started selling SIM cards in seven of the twenty-two license areas that India calls circles. The brand was Uninor, the operator was a joint venture between Telenor and the Indian property group Unitech, and Telenor's own account of the first month says Orissa came in on 22 December and that 1.2 million people had signed up by the time the year ended. For a network arriving late into a market already fighting on price, that was a quick beginning.

It was also standing on licenses that India's Supreme Court later decided should never have been handed out. The 2G spectrum case was about how the government had allocated airwaves in 2008, at fixed prices and on a first-come basis, and the court's answer on 2 February 2012 was to cancel 122 of them in a single ruling. Twenty-two belonged to Uninor. Telenor's statement that day said only that it had yet to review the judgment, which is what a company says when the floor has gone and nobody has worked out how far the drop is.

What followed was six years of paying to stay. Telenor broke with Unitech, rebuilt the business inside a new vehicle called Telewings, bid 4,018 crore rupees at the November 2012 re-auction to buy back spectrum in six circles, and kept going. The name changed to Telenor India on 23 September 2015. Then on 23 February 2017 it agreed to hand the whole operation to Bharti Airtel, which paid no cash and took on the spectrum dues instead. The Department of Telecommunications cleared the transfer on 14 May 2018, Airtel announced it the same day, and the brand stopped existing.

~ the dossier ~

~ the license that vanished ~

The circle system is the piece outsiders stumble over. India licenses mobile operators per region rather than nationally, so a carrier is really a portfolio of separate businesses that happen to share a logo, and losing a license does not shrink a company evenly. It removes whole states. When the 2012 judgment landed, Uninor was told to stop serving places where it had spent three years building, and the operators without spectrum were ordered off the air by 15 February 2013.

Here the distance is mine to admit: Turkey has three mobile operators and one national license each, so nothing in my own phone bill has ever worked this way, and I have never had to check which company exists in the province I am driving through. The Indian structure is the reason this death took six years instead of one. A carrier that loses a national license is finished that afternoon. A carrier that loses twenty-two regional ones can keep trading in the rest while it decides whether the rest is worth anything.

~ what the sim card kept ~

By the time Airtel took it, Telenor India was down to seven circles, among them Uttar Pradesh East and West, Bihar with Jharkhand, Gujarat, Maharashtra and Assam. The highest subscriber figure the regulator ever published for it was 53.11 million, in July 2016, and the company's own reporting usually ran several million lower than the regulator's, which was normal for the period and tells you how soft these numbers were.

The handover itself was designed to be invisible. Customers kept the same number and the same plan, and the instruction in the press coverage was to carry on using the SIM already in the phone. Nothing switched off at midnight. The brand was deleted above the customers' heads while service continued underneath, which is the modern way for a carrier to die and the reason almost nobody outside the industry noticed the date.

~ the price of staying ~

Telenor spent most of a decade establishing that a foreign operator could not make the Indian market work on these terms. It was not alone in that finding, and the years after its exit took out most of the other challengers too, but it is the one that paid twice: once for the original licenses in 2008, and again at the 2012 auction for the right to go on using some of them.

The exit price is the summary. After all of it, Airtel took the customers and the spectrum for no money at all, on the understanding that it would settle what was still owed to the government. A business with forty-four million users changed hands for the cost of its own debts.

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