The Tower and Infrastructure Providers Association (TAIPA) has urged Bharat Sanchar Nigam Limited (BSNL) to clear outstanding dues of infrastructure providers for ensuring the continuity of telecom operations at BSNL’s tower sites, amid the Covid-19 crisis.
In this regard, the industry body has written to BSNL requesting the clearance of huge outstanding dues of its IP-1 members in order to maintain 24×7 continuity of operations at BSNL tower sites.
Additionally, TAIPA has also requested the telecom secretary Anshu Prakash for an urgent intervention to get these outstanding dues cleared.
According to TAIPA, its members are facing huge cash crunch, leading to multiple challenges in ensuring smooth operations on telecom tower sites of BSNL. The members have been facing the difficulty in payment of rentals to landlords, challenges in operation and maintenance (O&M) expenses for running of BSNL tower sites. Further, this is also impacting the procurement of diesel/batteries and other back-up storage devices for the telecom towers sites.
That apart, other challenges include maintaining the uptime as per service agreement for BSNL tower sites, which is leading to network outage and blackouts in nearby areas of the sites.
