Scope of telecom infra providers should be enhanced: BIF

New Delhi, Sep 30 (IANS) The scope of telecom infrastructure providers (IP) in the country should be enhanced to include provisioning of common sharable active infrastructure to all concerned entities, the Broadband India Forum (BIF) said on Monday.

In a statement, the industry body said that enhancing the scope would lead to more efficient utilisation of resources, reduce cost for all players, make available affordable tariffs and help in expeditious rollout of ‘next generation’ services such as 5G for the customers.

“With advancing technology and the proliferation of applications, next-generation and value-added services are rapidly emerging which use the networks/services of existing TSPs at higher layers.

“These next-generation, value-added services and applications are invaluable, not only to end users, but also to all the stakeholders in the value chain and the economy as a whole,” it said.

In this situation, empowering the infrastructure providers could prove highly beneficial to the growth trajectory of communications technology in India, according to BIF.

“Hence, it is imperative that IP1s (IP Category-1) be provided Right of Way (RoW) to enable expeditious rollout of the critically needed infrastructure,” the statement said.

T.V. Ramachandran, President, BIF, said: “The opportunity is ripe for review of the scope for IP1s to cope with the ongoing huge data explosion as well as data growth, that is likely to arise out of next-generation services such as 5G and IoT/M2M.

“We would like to thank the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI) for bringing out the consultation paper for discussion on enhancement of scope for IP1s and have respectfully submitted our views and recommendations on the same.”