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Our Bureau

New Delhi, Aug. 7 Kick-starting the second phase of creating cellular infrastructure in rural areas using the Universal Services Obligation fund, the Department of Telecom has invited expression of interest from companies who want to bid for the project.

The Government plans to roll out 11,000 towers across 2.5 lakh villages as part of this project. Another 275 million people are set to come under mobile coverage area over the next one year. In the first phase, nearly 8,000 towers were set up.

Once the second phase is completed, almost the entire country will have access to mobile phones. Only those companies which are shortlisted by the DoT will be allowed to take part in the bidding process.

The first phase had received tremendous response from the various telecom players. Some of the companies had bid so aggressively that they offered to pay the Government to participate in the project rather than taking from the USO fund. DoT officials said that similar bids were expected in the second phase as well.

The project is divided into two parts. In the first part, bids for setting up passive infrastructure would be invited. Passive infrastructure means setting up the tower, the power systems, the civil work to set up the base stations, among others. This is essentially done by tower infrastructure companies such as GTL, Quippo and American Tower Corp.

Telecom service providers like Bharti Airtel and Reliance Communications, which have their own infrastructure companies, are also expected to bid for this part of the project.

More Stories on : Telecommunications

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