NEW DELHI: India needs to deploy 12 lakh telecom towers and fiberise 65% of them by 2023-24 to have seamless connectivity of 5G in the country. According to the Digital Infrastructure Providers Association (DIPA), despite proactive support from the government & the Department of Telecommunications (DoT), the telecom infrastructure providers are still facing hurdles in faster deployment of 5G with issues pertaining to Discoms not following the 5G rollout policy in alignment with the state-central Right of Way (RoW) policy, facility for bulk RoW permission since no of such poles, which could be used for 5G cell deployment.
“To meet the growing demand of large Bandwidth, throughput, and ultra-low latency, 65% of the telecom towers need to be fiberised and 12 lakh telecom towers need to be deployed by FY24. As of date, 36% of the telecom towers are fiberised and nearly 7,50,000 towers are deployed in India,” said T R Dua, Director-General of DIPA.
The association is of the view that the Indian Telegraph Rules, 2016, were released more than 6 years ago and needed major changes to cope with the demand of the 5G rollout.