Rel Comm, Bharti in talks to share cell sites

Reliance Communications and Bharti Group are in talks to share about 2,000 cell sites across the country, which will enable the two operators to cut infrastructure costs and provide more affordable mobile services to consumers.

According to sources, both the companies are in advanced stage of discussions and a final decision on the infrastructure sharing could be announced in a couple of weeks.

The number of shared sites could be in the range of 2,000, they said.

The companies would use each other's infrastructure in the country, which will bring down the cost and enable them to offer quality services at further reduced tariffs to the users.

When contacted, reliance officials declined to comment.

In July, Minister for Communications and IT Dayanidhi Maran had unveiled 'project most' in which telecom operators would share passive infrastructure like towers to save significant resources to fund further roll out, enhance aesthetics of the environment and lower the costs per operator.

The project is aimed at lowering the cost of offering services, thereby enabling operators to reduce tariffs further, which would also result in quality of service with lesser call drops as operators use each other's network to reach the remotest part of a city or village.

According to COAI, there are at present 70,000 towers catering to 100 million mobile users and about 1.4 lakh towers would be needed by 2007 at a cost of about Rs 25,000 crore.