The European Court of Justice will look into a complaint by T-Mobile Austria with regards to the redistribution of frequencies following the merger of Orange Austria and Hutchison 3G. T-Mobile said in a blog post that the Austrian higher administrative…
The European Court of Justice will look into a complaint by T-Mobile Austria with regards to the redistribution of frequencies following the merger of Orange Austria and Hutchison 3G.
T-Mobile said in a blog post that the Austrian higher administrative court referred the case to be heard by the European court.
T-Mobile had complained that it was left with only three 2.1GHz frequencies packages suitable for UMTS, compared to Hutchison’s five, and Telekom Austria’s four licences. Furthermore, T-Mobile’s frequencies are not adjacent, making it more difficult to use them for mobile services.
The mobile operator had said earlier that it would have to invest an additional €90m in LTE technology in order to compete with Telekom Austria’s A1 and Hutchison going forward.
T-Mobile hopes that the court will eventually rule that a new process for the reallocation of the frequencies needs to be launched.
According to T-Mobile the Austrian court asked its European counterpart for an accelerated procedure on the matter, which means a ruling might come before the upcoming Austrian frequency auction, scheduled for autumn.
