The telecom regulator has asked the telecom department (DoT) to ‘revisit’ its Right of Way (RoW) rules whose terms imply tower companies such as Bharti Infratel, Indus Towers and American Tower Corp are excluded from seeking benefits under the rules. It warned that such an exclusion would lead to a slowdown in tower installations, hurting quality of services.
The government, in its Right of Way (RoW) policy unveiled on November 15 last year, allowed only a ‘telecom service licensee’ to seek Right of Way. With this, telecom infrastructure providers such as Indus Towers, Bharti Infratel, American Tower Corp (ATC), Tower Vision and GTL Infrastructure, which deploy mobile telephony towers for licensed telecom service providers, were excluded from seeking RoW.“The infrastructure providers are registered with DoT and provide telecom infrastructure to only telecom service provider.
The infrastructure provider (IP) industry that has invested 2.5 lakh crore in the country was created in 2000 and is registered with the DoT for implementation, maintenance and leasing of passive infrastructure— mobile towers and fibre-based networks—for telcos catering to 1.1 billion Indians. The development comes at a time when infrastructure firms too are undergoing massive consolidation in tandem with the service industry, which is operating under intense financial pressure amid drop in revenues following Reliance Jio’s foray in September 2016.
In 2016, Boston-based ATC acquired a controlling stake in Kolkata based Srei Infrastructure promoted Viom Networks at 7,635 crore, while Reliance Communications is selling a controlling stake in its tower unit to Canada’s Brookfield.
By Baishakhi Dutta
