Saturday, December 22, 2007

RCom, BSNL in talks for tower business

Arijit Banerjee

Friday, December 21, 2007 (New Delhi):

Reliance Communications is looking to expand its tower business to take on the mega tower company created by the big three GSM players (Bharti, Vodafone and Idea) of the Indian mobile market.

For this purpose Anil Ambani's tower company seems to be targeting an unlikely partner, the state owned telecom giant Bharat Sanchar Nigam Limited (BSNL).

BSNL is on the lookout for partners who have a good tower network in cities. The company had earlier invited bids from private players for taking towers on rent but this venture will be different as towers will be shared on a reciprocal basis.

"We have initiated discussions separately for this with individual teleco," said Kuldeep Goyal, CMD, BSNL.

BSNL has about 30,000 GSM towers and around 6000 CDMA towers with most of them in rural and semi-urban areas.

Reliance tower infrastructure limited has about 17,000 towers while BSNL has about 36,000 towers putting their total tower strength at 53,000 towers. Both of them are not very far from the 70,000 towers under Indus tower the joint venture tower company of Bharti, Vodafone and Idea.

Meanwhile in a move similar to other telcos BSNL is also looking at the option of demerging its tower business. Adds Goyal, "A study has been commissioned for this and we will decide after we receive the report."

But Anil Ambani may have a tough fight on his hands in finally bagging the deal because even Bharti has got into the game trying to woo BSNL to its side.

After all BSNL's tower network in rural areas will save any mobile operators thousands of crore in capex investments.
 
 
Source: NDTV Profit

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