Twenty-one years. That’s how long Nosy Tarsee’s favorite telecom underdog chased a frequency through the halls of the Supreme Court, four petitions deep.

And when the resolution finally landed, it brought the kind of bureaucratic anticlimax that makes you wonder if the universe has a sense of humor.

Yes, the company has to cough up the regulatory fees from when the regulator did the math back when Friendster was still all the rage.

The computation was ruled correct, reasonable, and not unconscionable. Nine figures, give or take, plus change.

The thing they fought a generation to keep is now a museum piece.

Picture chasing a treasure chest for 21 years, kicking down doors, filing motions, waiting through three changes in Supreme Court composition, only to pry it open and find a flip phone inside.

That’s the 3G spectrum saga in a nutshell. The frequency band at the center of this entire legal odyssey was cutting-edge when the case was filed.          

The rest of the industry sprinted past on 4G, then 5G, while this fight crawled through the docket.

Nosy Tarsee’s source in the regulatory affairs trade calls it “winning the argument and losing the war.” You can be completely vindicated about who owns the toaster and still discover nobody wants toast anymore.

But the company isn’t sulking in the corner. While one hand was losing an old fight over the old spectrum, the other hand has been quietly building a case for the new spectrum.

We’re talking about the 3.6–3.8 gigahertz (GHz) band, the stuff actual 5G networks (and eventually 6G and satellite-to-mobile integration) are built on.

And the timing couldn’t be more perfect. Just as the old spectrum fight closes, a new law that reshuffles who calls the shots on telecom policy lands on the books, consolidating planning power under a technology department that didn’t even exist when this whole 3G saga started.

Sources close to the matter say the company is already lining up meetings, eager to discuss the deployment of next-generation infrastructure before the ink dries.

Anyone willing to litigate a spectrum fight for two decades, through a fee dispute that started before the iPhone existed, is not the type to fold quietly.

The lesson is that the next chapter may matter far more than the one that just ended.

And if there’s one thing this company has proved, it’s a willingness to wait out the courts for as long as it takes to find out.

For the company, the struggle isn’t over; it’s just changing frequencies.