The Department of Telecommunications (DoT) is considering a proposal to permit operators and telecom infrastructure providers to form consortiums to jointly bid for turnkey contracts entailing extending mobile coverage across 57,000 uncovered villages.
Currently, a DoT panel is examining potential licencing and regulatory issues that may crop up in case of such collaborations.
The panel is of the opinion that the onus of complying with licence conditions lies with the operators and not the tower companies. Besides, the panel has also advocated deployment of renewable energy solutions such as solar, fuel cells or wind to run telecom towers in remote regions. This is on the grounds that it is not feasible to use conventional energy solutions in these areas due to inadequate grid power and the challenges of transporting diesel in tough terrain.
Further, the panel has declined the telecom infrastructure providers? request for allowing tower sharing in uncovered regions on the grounds that there is no business case of involving multiple mobile operators given the low population in these regions. However, the panel is considering viability gap funding to compensate both the capex and opex cost of deploying alternate sources of energy for providing coverage in far flung areas. The financial support will be paid out of the Universal Services Obligation (USO) Fund corpus.
