The Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI) has extended the deadline for submission of comments and counter-comments on its consultation paper on ‘Use of Street Furniture for Small Cell and Aerial Fiber Deployment’ to May 11, 2022 and May 25, 2022, respectively.
TRAI had released a consultation paper titled ‘Use of Street furniture for small cell and aerial fiber deployment’ on March 23, 2022. The last date of receiving comments on the issues raised in the consultation paper from the stakeholders was fixed as April 20, 2022 and counter comments as May 4, 2022.
The extension in the deadline comes in the backdrop of the requests received from stakeholders for extension of time for submission of comments on the ground that paper is very extensive and requires more preparation time. To this end, the regulator decided to extend the last date for submission of written comments and counter comments.
Meanwhile, TRAI is currently conducting the pilot project for deploying street furniture at four locations including Kandla Port in Gujarat, Indira Gandhi International (IGI) Airport in Delhi, Bengaluru Metro Rail Corporation, and Bhopal city.
The Department of Telecommunications (DoT) has already started considering the use of street furniture to densely deploy next-generation telecom infrastructure to overcome Right-of-Way (RoW) challenges, and an internal committee is currently reviewing the availability of street furniture for leveraging the seamless 5G network in other states. To this end, the telecom department has recently released draft policy guidelines to bring consistency in RoW related procedures across states and spur the deployment of telecom infrastructure using street furniture ahead of a pan-India rollout of 5G technology.
