The telecom tower business is really heating up. Just 2 days ago, Vodafone had spun off its tower business as a separate unit. Airtel, IDEA and Vodafone already share the infrastructure via a Indus Towers a jointly owned company. Reliance has its on own tower business.

But, none of this infrastructure is enough to expand in a way any telecom provider wants to. There are rural areas which are not covered by any of the service providers except BSNL. Reason is, the rural markets does not provide the kind of business which can justify the huge costs involved in a tower installation. Urban market is almost saturated and to get the next 100 million customers – most probably from rural areas – infrastructure is very important.Telecom Tower

Citing this as a business opportunity, BSNL is ready to lease its 60,000 strong towers in tier 2 and tier 3 cities. I cannot think of any other word than “awesome” about this situation. Especially because this decision is coming from a PSU.

A senior official of the telecom company on Monday said that since we have more towers in tier II and tier III cities, we have decided to lease out those towers with unutilized capacity to the operators. (source)

This is a win-win situation for both BSNL and other service providers like Airtel, Reliance and Vodafone. They can share BSNL’s infrastructure and continue to expand their services in rural and semi-urban areas.

If you look at it, this is kind of a co-competition for BSNL. It has set itself a target of 90 million subscribers by this year-end. If BSNL’s infrastructure is opened up to other providers the might snatch away some of BSNL’s potential customers.

In this new economy that is not the way to look at things. It is more of collaboration and thinking win-win which matters the most.

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