Uncertainty almost always is a negative for capital investment. So perhaps it is not unexpected that uncertainty about buying and selling of spectrum licenses is hampering other decisions, such as sharing of spectrum between mobile operators in the India mobile market.
The issue is that although spectrum sharing between two mobile operators with spectrum assets in the same bands (800 MHz, for example) now is allowed, those sharing agreements have a term of five years, where the underlying spectrum licenses run for 20 years.
That creates risk for any mobile operators choosing to share spectrum, as it is not clear that the deals will be renewable, and under what terms, after the five year period.
The new rules are intended to help mobile operators aggregate the minimum 5-MHz contiguous spectrum blocks needed to support Long Term Evolution fourth generation (4G) services.
