Tata Teleservices Ltd. (TTSL) on Wednesday signed an infrastructure sharing agreement with Bharat Sanchar Nigam Ltd. that would help expand its reach nationally.
The 15-year ‘Master services agreement for passive infrastructure sharing’ will allow TTSL and TTSL (Maharashtra) to use thousands of BSNL towers for its telecom services in all 22 telecom circles. Since the government and private telecom companies announced their plans to go in for infrastructure sharing to reduce their input costs, this is first major agreement involving two big telecom players.
For BSNL also, which has vast network of towers across India, particularly in rural areas, it is also first such initiative.
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“We have become the first private telecom operator to enter into such a strategically important agreement with BSNL, one that will allow us to expand our telecom footprint across the country much more quickly,” said TTSL President (Legal and Regulatory Affairs) Madhav Joshi.
TTSL has been aggressively expanding its network presence on the CDMA side with Tata Indicom, while also rolling out GSM services under the Tata DOCOMO brand name. “This agreement has the potential to not just speed up our network expansion and rollout process, but would also have a substantial impact in terms of reduced costs,” said TTSL Chief Technology Officer A. G. Rao.