Mukesh Ambani-led Reliance Jio Infocomm this week signed two tower-sharing deals with GTL Infrastructure and Indus Towers to hasten the deployment of its 4G services in India. The agreement with GTL Infrastructure will see Reliance Jio using about 30,000 of their telecom towers spanning across 22 telecom circles in India, while the deal with Indus Towers wil see access to 113,490 towers across 15 telecom circles. Indus Towers is a joint venture between Airtel, Vodafone and Idea.
The new player in India's telecommunications scen has been actively pursuing a number of infrastructure-sharing agreements with telecommunications companies with existing passive infrastructure in place. According to Reliance Jio Infocom, the tower sharing practice helps to curb environmental damage due to diesel usage, in addition to providing faster service rollout at reduced costs.
According to a statement by Reliance Jio, it has completed the installation of about 32,000 Long Term Evolution (LTE) base stations across the country and has since increased base-station installation to 6,500 per month as compared to the rate of about 3,000 per month in May 2014.
Reliance Jio owns pan-India airwaves in the 2300MHz band since May 2010 and must deploy its 4G services by May 2015 to comply with its license agreement. It has also won the 1800MHz band airwaves at an auction in February this year. It is believed that this will be used to launch 4G data services and 2G voice services.
"Our mission is to launch pan-India next-generation voice and data services. We will build the same through a judicious combination of own build and rented infrastructure. Further, he added that the GTL deal is "not only a step in that direction but will also help us accelerate our roll out."
- Sanjay Mashruwala, Managing Director of Reliance Jio Infocomm
