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Over the last seven years, the Indian telecom tower industry<\/a> has grown significantly by 65% with the number of mobile towers increasing from 400,000 in 2014 to 660,000 in 2021.
The tower company said it is in a strong position to harness the 5G<\/a> potential to serve its telco customers in India.
“We certainly are well positioned to do our part,” Sanjay Goel, executive vice president and president, Asia-Pacific, told ET. “We believe that given our nationwide scale, long-standing customer relationships and learnings in the marketplace over the last decade plus, we are in a great position to deliver strong growth both organically and through the deployment of new sites for many years to come.”
Goel said the availability of 5G will power new use cases such as edge computing, which will result in a whole level of new usage putting pressure on networks. “This in turn will result in a tremendous data-driven demand, which will require a significant number of new sites and capacity enhancement of existing ones.”
ATC<\/a> currently has a 75,000-strong towers portfolio in India—over a third of its 220,000-global towers portfolio. It plans to add another 3,500 tower sites in calendar 2022 to address tower network expansion needs, especially with telcos likely to start 5G network deployments later this year after the spectrum sale around May-June.
In this growing market, ATC is planning to invest a total of Rs 2,000 crore by 2023 to drive organic business growth, including the continued execution of our new build programme.
“As India goes 5G, we plan to expand our tower base to address these tower expansion needs. In addition, India will probably need half a million small cells and microcells over the next three years, and no one stakeholder group has the capability to provide all of this capacity. Collaboration among key players will be critical,” he added.
The executive said that a successful 5G roll out will be enabled by robust new-build tower expansion activities, greater densification, smaller towers, street furniture, small cells, in-building solutions, fibre to tower, managed rooftops, and services that speed network deployment.
ATC expects fiberisation of towers to pick up with the introduction of 5G technology. Currently, around 34% of telecom towers are connected with fibre and for the full potential of 5G to be realised, at least 70%of towers need to be connected with fibre.