Visakhapatnam: The state government will be using government buildings, public places like RTC bus stations and electric substations to setup mobile towers across the state as part of building communication tower infrastructure.
GIS mapping of such buildings suitable is underway. Government decided to develop tower infrastructure especially telecommunication services related towers in the state to deepen the reach of high speed qualitative telecom services including 3G / 4G / Wi-Fi especially in rural areas and also to develop smart cities.
A Detailed Project Report (DPR) preparation is underway by a consultant picked up by Infra-structure Corporation of Andhra Pradesh (INCAP), which had recently called tenders to select the consultant.
“The non-contiguous tower infrastructure and lack of sufficient in-building solution are the key challenges for mobile operators to offer mobile services at international standards. With recent directives from TRAI, mobile operators are aggressively looking for cost effective options to offer better mobile services across India. However, the major hurdle to develop a seamless network for the mobile operators is lack of towers,” said a senior INCAP official.
While the state government would set up these towers the mobile operators can use them at a fixed price. State government also has plans that the proposed tower infrastructure can be utilized in association with the optical fiber network infrastructure which can form a robust digital backbone in expanding the telecom and digital services / facilities across the state.
State government felt that the world is going through an era of data deluge. Mobile data traffic is forecast to grow rapidly across all geographies, at a faster rate than that of mobile connections.
This is due to significant increases in mobile traffic per device. The mobile data growth in India has been much below the global peers in the past. Recently, India has shown rapid growth, fueled by the telecom savvy young population.
However, due to the lack of infrastructure, the mobile data network performance in India is still below the global standards, said the RFP document of the INCAP calling consultants.
The selected consultant agency will also report on the existing scenario of tower infrastructure in AP which includes all types of communication towers, network towers and smart towers etc. Mapping cellular coverage in AP and identifying the gaps in providing 3G/4G/Wi-Fi services is also part of the consultancy work.
