NEW DELHI: The number of initiatives taken by the telecom regulator would eventually help the telecom sector to reduce financial stress, and deploy infrastructure more rapidly, the top official said.
"We have recommended many things (to ease stress) like sharing of infrastructure that will help cost to come down," PD Vaghela, chairman, Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (Trai) told ETTelecom, adding that the regulator was also working on ease of doing business, as a part of the Right-of-Way (RoW) regime.
Vaghela further said that the telecom watchdog would soon come out with its views on RoW and in-building solutions (IBS) deployment which would facilitate the introduction of 5G that requires special kind of infrastructure even within the premises.
The telecom industry is seeking a uniform infrastructure policy, citing anomalies in levies charged by local authorities or municipal bodies across the country where in few cases companies pay upto 1000% more than the prescribed fee of Rs 1,000 per kilometre.
In November 2016, the Department of Telecommunications (DoT) had notified the RoW policy to accelerate the deployment of telecom infrastructure, as a part of the 'ease of doing business' exercise, but only 16 states have so far implemented it, according to the Tower and Infrastructure Providers Association (Taipa).
The non-implementation of Centrally-designated rules have led telecom carriers and infrastructure providers to shell out substantial money as a part of capital expenditure (capex) for network expansion as well as the upcoming 5G rollout that would require a dense network to achieve low latency.
The industry estimates point out that Reliance Jio, Bharti Airtel and Vodafone Idea would collectively need to spend more than $30 billion or about Rs 2.1 lakh crore alone to put up base stations and fibre infrastructure for rolling out ultra-fast 5G services alone.
The telecom regulator believes that the incumbent service providers and tower firms would save capex significantly following the sharing of active infrastructure.
"We are saying infrastructure providers who are sharing passive infrastructure, to also share active one, and can also boost fiberisation in the country," Vaghela added.
Nearly a third or about 35% of telecom tower sites are fiberised today as compared to countries like China, Japan and the US where close to 80% of the towers are fiberised which according to experts, is a prerequisite for data networks.
The telecom watchdog had already submitted its suggestions on active infrastructure sharing to the telecom department, aimed to enhance the scope of companies, and believes that the move would allow infrastructure as a service (IaaS) for telecom carriers, and they could easily share networks with reduced capex and opex.
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