“The success of Digital India, financial inclusion lies in making Internet available at the bottom of pyramid. The telecom infrastructure industry faces glitches in network rollout especially in rural and semi-urban areas,” Akhil Gupta said at the annual general meeting of TAIPA.
TAIPA, which is focusing on green telecom, said it converted 100,000 sites as diesel free sites — consuming less than 1 litre of diesel per day.
Indian telecom operators such as Bharti Airtel, Idea Cellular, Vodafone, Reliance Jio, Reliance Communications and BSNL connect their 1.1 billion subscribers through 450,000 towers mounted with over 15 lakh BTSs.
Leading telecom tower companies such as ATC Telecom Infra, ATC India Tower, ATC Telecom Tower, Indus Towers, GTL Infrastructures, Tower Vision India, Bharti Infratel and Reliance Infratel are the members of Tower and Infrastructure Providers Association (TAIPA).
Tilak Raj Dua, director general of TAIPA said that the telecom industry will unfold more new business avenues in the forthcoming time in the wake of the government’s thrust on Digital India and Smart Cities.
TAIPA demanded priority EB connections and quality power on preferential tariffs rather than the commercial tariffs; Safety and security of telecom infrastructure is another long-pending demand of the telecom industry.
“Telecommunication and telecommunication infrastructure is the backbone of Digital India, where future technologies like mobility, analytics, cloud, Internet of Things (IoT), Machine to Machine (M2M) Communications are playing a key role in implementing the Digital India vision,” said Aruna Sundararajan, chairman, Telecom Commission and Secretary (T), Department of Telecommunication (DoT), in a written message.
TAIPA members and other stakeholders discussed key concern areas such as non-discriminatory access to Right of Way and inclusion of IP-1s in the RoW notified rules; extension of benefits under infrastructure status to tower industry; availability of Government resources such as land and buildings on a fair and non- discriminatory basis to both TSPs and IPs for installation of telecom infrastructure and alignment of states tower installation guidelines with the DoT guidelines/RoW Rules of November 2016.
“Infrastructure players must have an active role in the provisioning of common duct, in-building solutions, pubic Wi-Fi and fibre lay etc,” said RS Sharma, chairman of TRAI, in a video message to TAIPA members during the AGM.