RTIL unveils world's largest tower site plan

Reliance Telecom Infrastructure Ltd (RTIL), a subsidiary of Reliance Communications, today announced the launch of the world's largest tower site acquisition programme by launching a portal to directly connect to tower-site owners across the country.

The launch of the portal www.btssite.relianceada.com, forms an integral part of RTIL's ongoing expansion plans to set up over 40,000 tower sites across 25,000 towns and 6 lakh villages during the current financial year.

The portal enables individual and corporate site-owners to submit the details of their site along with complete location parameters, site dimensions and offer details to RTIL directly.

The offers, once received, would be mapped with RTIL's existing and future infrastructure rollouts, to evaluate the proposal.

Based on the immediate and future requirements, company representatives would contact the site owners to further the process. The locations where RTIL is in the process of identifying sites would also be listed on the portal.

RTIL , executives say, plans to have 1 lakh tenancy slots by end of this financial year. The tower infrastructure of RTIL has the capability to host electronics of various generations, including 2G, 2.5G, 3G, 4G and any future technology. Each tower has the capacity to host 4 to 7 tenants.

RTIL was demerged from Reliance Communications earlier this year so that it could offer its infrastructure to all operators. Reliance Telecom Infrastructure currently has over 15,000 towers and is constructing another 25,000 towers during this financial year.

The key benefits of using the portal is that RTIL would have direct access to a larger base of site-owners and, therefore, would be able to identify sites faster.

This will help them in planning network expansion more efficiently and will also offer site owners a simple process to tie up for tenancy agreements. RTIL will face tough competition from rivals who are also consolidating their tower business.

Yesterday, Bharti, Vodafone-Essar and Idea Cellular merged 70,000 towers into a new company Indus Towers( owned by the three) which will control over 60 per cent of the country's passive tower infrastructure. The Essar group and the Tatas have also set up separate companies to run passive tower infrastructure.