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Thomas K. Thomas

New Delhi, Nov. 17 Almost all the private mobile infrastructure companies, including GTL, Quipo, Reliance Infrastructure, Bharti Airtel and Idea Cellular, have lined up to offer cellular towers to Bharat Sanchar Nigam Ltd.

BSNL had floated a tender seeking expression of interest from companies willing to offer their infrastructure on lease for a period of 15 years.

Senior BSNL officials said that the expression of interest is being processed and all eligible companies would be empanelled as partners. “We will negotiate with each of the companies which have expressed interest and offer the contract area-wise, depending on the price and availability of towers.”

BSNL had earlier decided to ride on private operator’s cellular infrastructure in a bid to roll out its services faster and cheaper across the country. The PSU will lease passive infrastructure such as tower, shelter, generator sets and other power systems.

This is the first time that the national telecom major has sought to take any infrastructure-based support from other telecom companies. So far, BSNL had refused to either share its infrastructure with any of the other operators or hire from others.

However, BSNL officials said that the company was now also willing to allow private operators to hire mobile infrastructure in areas where the PSU has a stronger network. They said separate negotiations would be held with private operators to arrive at the commercial terms and conditions.

BSNL’s move is in line with the industry trend of sharing infrastructure. Private cellular companies are already depending on each other’s infrastructure under an industry initiative called Mobile Operators Shared Towers (MOST).

Companies such as Bharti Airtel, Idea Cellular and Vodafone Essar are reaching out to new areas riding on each other’s network. Some of the operators have hired up to 60 per cent of their passive infrastructure requirement from others as it is helping them not only drive down costs significantly but also expand their coverage faster.

While Bharti has around 40,000 towers, Essar Vodafone has 20,000 towers and pure infrastructure providers such as GTL has plans to roll out 25,000 towers.

BSNL has only about 15,000 towers and would therefore benefit from sharing with private operators. As per industry estimates, there are over one lakh towers but with more than 40 per cent of the population yet to be covered with cellular infrastructure, at least 2 lakh more towers would be required.

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Tower cos line up to offer infrastructure to BSNL

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