Trai proposes passive, active network sharing

Acknowledging the need of vast infrastructure requirement in the mobile telephony in the country, the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (Trai) today proposed sharing of passive, active and back haul networks for faster roll out of networks in urban and rural areas at lower cost.

The exponential growth in wireless telecom services calls for massive investment in infrastructure particularly passive, active and back haul components. The country would require about 3.3 lakh towers by 2010 against the present 1 lakh towers. Apart from huge investments needed the time taken to roll out could be a major bottleneck in the achievement of 500 million subscribers by 2010.

Even if the target is achieved it will only be about 50% of the tele-density with major gaps in the rural areas, Trai said in its proposals to the Department of Telecom (DoT).

Given the significance Trai not only considered the issue of passive infrastructure sharing but has recommended active infrastructure sharing and back haul on a suo-moto basis.

Passive infrastructure sharing means sharing of physical sites, buildings, shelters, towers, power supply and battery backup and is permitted under the licenses. Trai has, however, not favoured any policy intervention for this.

More importantly, Trai has proposed active infrastructure sharing which is currently not permitted in the licenses.

"Considering the importance of back haul sharing for mobile services in rural and far flung areas, licensing conditions should be amended to allow operators to share their back haul in a limited way on optical fibre. No sharing of spectrum at access network side is permitted", it said.