The Digital Infrastructure Providers Association (DIPA), on Monday, said, the tower companies are still facing hurdles to deploy telecom infrastructure for 5G services. The reasons cited by the organisation for such issues include non-alignment of 5G rollout policy by discoms, the absence of facility for laying small cells in bulk through the right-of-way(RoW) permission, and some states yet to comply with the Centre’s RoW policy.
The RoW permissions, which are dealt at the state levels, are essential for telecom service providers to lay towers, cables, and other telecom infrastructure. In order to make way for faster and easy deployment of telecom infrastructure, the government introduced GatiShakti Sanchar portal last year, a centralised portal for all RoW permissions.
“To meet the growing demand of large bandwidth, throughput, and ultra-low latency, 65% of the telecom towers need to be fiberised and 1.2 million telecom towers need to be deployed by FY23-24. Despite proactive support from the Government of India & Department of Telecommunications(DoT), the telecom infrastructure providers are still facing hurdles in faster infrastructure deployment of 5G,” said TR Dua, director general of DIPA. The association represents tower companies and telecom infrastructure providers like Indus Towers, ATC, Summit Digitel, etc.
A hassle-free RoW permission especially for small cells is necessary in order to provide seamless and true 5G experience to consumers, according to experts. As on date, 36% of the telecom towers are fiberised and approximately 750,000 towers are deployed in India, DIPA said.
In order to have a good 5G coverage, deployment of small cells is necessary. Further, since discoms own a lot of electricity poles, laying of these small cells on top of such poles would facilitate the rollout. With regard to deployment of small cells, the infrastructure providers say that since there are thousands of poles on which small cells are to be deployed, bulk permission would save them deployment costs.
“Amendment to the Right of Way 2016 Rules was released in 2022 incorporating policy for Poles and Street Furniture but at present, only few states, including Maharashtra, Rajasthan, Chandigarh, Sikkim, Tripura, Manipur, Uttarakhand, Assam and Ladakh have aligned their state policy with the Indian Telegraph Right of Way -Amendment Rules, 2022, rest all States/UT’s are yet to adopt the policy causing delay in creation of robust digital infrastructure and making India 5G ready,” Dua said.
In line with the pace at which 5G is being rolled out in the country, communications minister Ashwini Vaishnaw last month said there will be 100% coverage of 5G in the country by December 2024.
“Today, 85% of the permissions to lay telecom towers are happening instantaneously. The average duration to approve (the telecom infra-related requests) is seven days, which was earlier 200 days,” Vaishnaw said.
Till February end, telecom operators such as Jio and Airtel launched 5G in 387 districts, with deployment of 100,000 base transceiver stations (BTS).
