BSNL to announce infrastructure sharing policy

The company is in the final stages of drawing the guidelines on the policy and will announce it in a month, a highly-placed source in the company said.

 The policy would spell out the number of towers to be shared, the business model, tower-tenant ratio and the time-frame for the towers would be shared, the source added.

The tower business would help the PSU recover from its falling revenues as it is at an advantageous position of having the maximum reach in the country.

The company has more number of towers in 'B' category circles and villages where private operators have small footprint.

It is also argued that other operators would rather use BSNL's towers than erecting new towers to cut cost.

 The state-run telecom firm has 50,000 mobile towers, the maximum in the country.

The company is also planning to carve out a new entity for its tower business in a few months. BSNL would look after the maintenance of the towers in the new entity while rest of the things will be outsourced to a third party, said the source.

The PSU is also learnt to be in talks with some major players which are purely into the tower business for this purpose, he added.

Except, BSNL, all other major operators like Bharti, Vodafone, Idea and Reliance have already entered into the business of tower sharing.