India's telecom department has agreed to build a nationwide wireless broadband network for the defense forces, but the battle over spectrum is far from over.
The wheels are in motion over the creation of the network, after an agreement was reached between the defense and telecom ministries late last month, sources told the Economic Times.
The armed forces will be able to choose whether to rollout a Wimax or LTE network.
The building of a defense network was a key condition to defense's agreement to release its allocation of 3G spectrum, so the government had enough to conduct its recent 3G auctions. This was to be a fiber network, but at the time defense officials expressed concern that the rollout would take too long.
But while the DoT had offered 10MHz of the wireless broadband spectrum, the military brass were pushing for 20MHz – as awarded in the BWA auctions in May.
The DoT has yet to agree to this request and plans to debate it at the next meeting between the departments, the sources said.