The announcement of the spectrum allocation policy by the department of telecommunications (dot) has spurred a letter writing campaign. Giant cellular service providers like Tata Indicom and Cellular Operator Association of India (coai) have shot off angry letters to the prime minister, petulant about the policy favouring their competitors. The ensuing squabble between Code Division Multiple Access (cdma) and the Global System for Mobile Communication (gsm) operators has brought into focus the importance of limited resource of spectrum