United Towers of Telecom

Ministry of Telecommunications has decided to bring the arch rivals together under the project MOST (Mobile Operators Shared Towers) whereby the GSM and CDMA operators would share ‘passive infrastructure’ like towers.

GSM (Global System for Mobile Communications), a digital cellular technology uses narrowband TDMA which allows eight simultaneous calls on the same radio frequency whereas, CDMA (Code-Division Multiple Access), is also a digital cellular technology but uses spread-spectrum technique. CDMA does not assign a specific frequency to each user instead every channel uses the full available spectrum. The two, thus operate on different technologies.

The Cellular Operators Associations of India (COAI) and Association of Unified Services Access Providers of India (AUSPI) for the first time shared a common view that to improve the cost efficiencies and offer affordable services to consumers (as India provided the lowest mobile tariffs in the world) this integration was required.

T.V. Ramachandran, Director General, COAI calls it to be a viable project. Giving the stats to prove the logic behind the initiative he says that at present around 70,000 towers cater to 100,000 subscribers and moving ahead at this rate to the 2010 target figures of telecom ministry it requires 350,000 towers for 500,000 subscribers. Costing of one tower varies from 15-20 lakhs on rooftop to about 40-50 lakhs for a base tower.

And when the industry is planning to expand in the rural sector where to costumer base would be less to start with, the proposition will be a win-win situation for the operators and the consumer. India being a price sensitive market so any reduction in the cost burden which travels to the consumer is more than welcome.