The Supreme Court on Friday admitted the cellular operators' interim application seeking stay on issuance of new mobile licences by DoT to basic operators like Reliance and Tatas and listed it for hearing on Monday.

The interim application, which was filed by Cellular Operators Association of India on Thursday, was mentioned on Friday before a bench comprising Justice S Rajendra Babu and Justice G P Mathur and listed for hearing on Monday.

The cellular operators had sought direction to Department of Telecom to maintain 'status quo' as on August 8 when a telecom tribunal order upheld government's decision to permit basic operators to offer WLL limited mobile service.

COAI's stay application is aimed at blocking issuance of new mobile licences under the unified regime, for which government issued final guidelines earlier this week.

Within three days of notifying the unified regime, Reliance Infocomm has already paid Rs 1,542 crore (Rs 15.42 billion) to convert its licences into unified to become eligible for offering fully mobile services on its WLL phones.

Even Tata Teleservices, HFCL and Shyam Telecom have applied for conversion of their existing service-specific licences into new unified licence and Shyam Telecom has also paid about Rs 2.96 crore (Rs 29.6 million) to DoT for the purpose.

The government has already issued an addendum to NTP-99 and added two categories of licences which includes unified access services licence for basic and cellular services and unified licence for all telecom services.

Earlier this week, the Supreme Court had admitted the petition of COAI challenging TDSAT's August 8 order that allowed WLL services to basic telecom operators in the country, and issued notice to the Centre.

A Bench comprising Justice S Rajendra Babu, Justice A R Lakshmanan and Justice G P Mathur had issued notice on the interim prayer of the petitioners seeking stay of the WLL services saying it infringed the NTP-99 and their service agreement.

The cellular operators, in their interim prayer, had requested the Court to direct the Centre not to give effect to permission for limited mobility, direct WLL operators not to make functional the handsets outside the SDCA, and that third party rights should not be allowed to be created.