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Reliance Jio Infocomm, a subsidiary of Reliance Industries Limited, has entered into an agreement with Tower Vision India, an independent tower company, to utilise the latter's telecom towers.
Tower Vision has a portfolio of 8,400 towers in India. This is the fifth deal Reliance Jio has signed for sharing telecom towers. It has earlier signed similar agreements with Reliance Communications (RCom), Bharti Airtel, Viom Networks and ATC.
"We are committed to offer our customers wide coverage of high speed 4G networks. As a consequence, we are continuing to build this through a combination of Towers that we are constructing on our own and those that we are renting from quality tower infrastructure partners. Our partnership with Tower Vision is another step in this direction," SanjayMashruwala, Managing Director, Reliance Jio, said in a statement.
The five tower-sharing agreements that Reliance Jio has signed so far would provide the Mukesh Ambani firm access to about 190,000 towers across the country. However, Reliance Jio has not disclosed details of how many towers it would actually share for its 4G services. In June 2013, Reliance Jio had signed its first tower-sharing agreement with RCom, in which it was projected to share about 45,000 towers of RCom's 50,000 towers across the country.
The deal was estimated at about Rs12,000 crore. In April, it had sigend a similar agreement with ATC that has about 11,000 towers in India. In December 2013, Reliance Jio and Bharti Airtel had signed an agreement to share telecom infrastructure. Besides sharing the towers of Bharti Infratel and Indus Towers, Reliance Jio and Bharti Airtel will also use each other's optic fibre networks. The deal would give Reliance Jio access to about 82,000 mobile towers. Reliance Jio has also signed an agreement with Viom Networks to share telecom towers.
Viom Networks has 45,000 towers across the country. On the other hand, Reliance Jio is likely to built about 25,000-30,000 mobile towers of its own. The company is expected to launch 4G services in the last quarter of this calendar year.
