India’s state-run telecom operator Bharat Sanchar Nigam Ltd. (BSNL), which has posted a loss of $1.2 billion for the FY2010-11, plans to lease out spare capacity of its network of towers to private players, according to news reports.
“BSNL has about 60,000 towers across the country. BSNL management has decided to lease out spare capacity of its towers to other private players on commercial terms and conditions to generate incremental revenue,” India’s junior telecommunications minister stated in a written reply to the India’s upper house of the Parliament on Friday.
He also added that so far BSNL has shared 1072 towers with the private players.
Deora also said that the Department of Telecom (DoT) regularly reviews the performance of BSNL to improve its financial health. According to him, some of steps taken by BSNL to reduce its losses and to improve its financial healthy are:
- Optimizing CAPEX and OPEX through convergence and consolidation of infrastructure.
- Strengthening of stable revenue streams through concerted focus on broadband and enterprise business with major focus on government projects.
- Focusing on the revenue from top 100 cities for monitoring purpose.
- Sustained operational focus on customer care, service delivery, service assurance, revenue management and asset management.
- Aggressive push on data usage and value added services.
- Clear cut segregation of commercial activities from social obligation to ensure sustainable growth.
- Progressive migration of current network to Next generation network thereby ensuring convergence, consolidation and seamless delivery of various services to end customers across different technologies.
