Videocon Telecom

» see videocontelecom.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

On 2 February 2012 the Supreme Court of India canceled 122 mobile licenses at once. They had been handed out in 2008 under a process the court found unlawful, and the companies holding them included Videocon, a consumer electronics group from Mumbai that had bought its way into telecoms and launched GSM service on 7 April 2010 under its own household name. One ruling took the licenses off it in almost every circle it had.

Videocon went back into the auction later that year and bought six circles back: Bihar, Haryana, Madhya Pradesh, Gujarat and the two halves of Uttar Pradesh. Those six were the whole operation from then on, six circles out of twenty-two, competing against incumbents with national reach and a decade's head start. It had once held licenses in eighteen circles and launched commercial service in eleven of them, so the auction left it with a third of the footprint it had been licensed for.

India in those years ran one of the most crowded mobile markets anywhere, with a dozen or so operators and tariffs low enough that the whole industry argued about whether anyone was making money. I was not a customer of any of them and have never set foot in a Videocon store. What makes this one legible from outside is the cause of death: a court correcting a government allocation that had happened before the company switched anything on.

~ the case file ~

~ the licenses ~

The 2G case is the best known corruption case in Indian telecoms, and the court's remedy was blunt: cancel the lot and auction the spectrum again. Videocon's licenses came out of that 2008 batch. Press reports put the number it lost at 21 and Wikipedia says 15, a discrepancy nobody has bothered to resolve, because for the company itself the figure that mattered was the one left over.

Buying spectrum back at a real auction price meant paying market rate for a position it had originally acquired cheaply, and doing it as the smallest serious operator in the room. The company kept at it for another three years. Late in 2015 it stopped trying.

~ the text message ~

The retreat came in two pieces. In November 2015 Videocon agreed to sell its Gujarat and Uttar Pradesh West spectrum to Idea Cellular for 3,310 crore rupees, and service in those two circles stopped on 26 December 2015. Then on 16 March 2016 Bharti Airtel announced an agreement to buy 2x5 MHz of 1800 MHz spectrum in all six circles for 4,428 crore rupees, which left the remaining four with a date.

Subscribers learned this from their handsets. TelecomTalk reported on 4 May 2016 that Videocon had started texting customers to say services would stop in Haryana from 11-05-2016 because of the spectrum transfer to Airtel, advising them to use up their current balance and port to Airtel as its preferred partner. Airtel confirmed the deal had completed on 24 May, two weeks after the network it had bought the spectrum out from under was already silent.

~ the last circle ~

One circle survived, because it was held through a different company. Punjab ran on Quadrant, a Mohali subsidiary formerly called HFCL Infotel, and it was not part of the Airtel sale. In January 2017 Quadrant told its subscribers it would cease mobile service on 15 February, without giving a reason. Regulators refused to let it, and ordered service maintained until the Punjab license expired on 30 September 2017. The last public instruction was to port out by midnight on 18 April 2017.

Regulatory data for October 2016 put about 2.98 million subscribers on the Punjab network, of whom fewer than half counted as active that month. The domain, videocontelecom.com, answers today with a 502 from a server that is still running and has nothing left to serve.

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