Bharti seeks sops for rural telephony

Bharti Airtel is believed to have approached the government for subsidies for its rural expansion plans, even as it sought liberalisation of active infrastructure sharing and mandatory sharing of all existing cell sites.

The Sunil Bharti Mittal company is also of the opinion that the Department of Telecommunications (DoT) should "incentivise infrastructure sharing" in rural areas to maintain a level playing field. According to sources, Bharti Airtel is seeking a meeting with the DoT secretary to discuss the issue.

The company had not benefited from the recently concluded Universal Services Obligation (USO) fund bid, with BSNL getting 80 per cent of the 7,871 towers in the rural areas. Other companies like GTL Infrastructure, Reliance Telecom (RTIL), Nitel and Quipo Infrastructure bagged the remaining towers.

Earlier, the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (Trai) had issued a recommendation stating that the government should look at providing subsidies for erecting towers to those service providers that are not beneficiaries of the USO fund.

The regulator had stated that a base transceiver station shared among three mobile operators that are not beneficiaries of the USO fund would be given 80 per cent of the amount decided under the fund. If a tower was to be shared between two operators, the subsidy would be proportionally reduced.

Bharti Airtel is seeking implementation of these recommendations at the earliest. The company is also believed to be of the opinion that early implementation will be effective in countering any dilatory tendencies in rolling out of the USO tender by successful bidders.

Earlier, the DoT had rolled out the USO fund to provide subsidies to companies offering services in areas with low average revenue per user, like rural and remote areas. The service providers in the country were offering 5 per cent of their adjusted gross revenue for the fund.