In India the pioneer of shared telecom towers infrastructure was GTL. Then Indus Towers was formed by a merger of the telecom towers built by three GSM operators: Bharti Airtel, Vodafone Essar and Idea Cellular. Sharing telecom towers leads to cost savings in site acquisition, civil works, annual site rent, transmission and operational costs for running the site. Setting up independent towers has led to overlapping and congestion, specially in urban areas, which has caused a fall in valuations. "Of more than 250,000 towers present today, 100,000 are unshared," says Manoj Tirodkar, chairman of GTL. Recently GTL Infrastructure paid Rs 48 lakh for each of Aircel’s 17,500 towers, which were valued at Rs 2 crore just two and half years earlier.
Buying towers brings readymade tenants. Moreover, towers have a life of 50 years. These facts, coupled with low valuations has led to a spate of mergers and acquisitions in the telecom tower business. Quippo Telecom transferred 5,000 of its towers to WTTIL. American Tower bought 100 per cent stake in Transcend, owning about 325 wireless sites for Rs 95 crore, while earlier it had acquired XCEL for $100 million. Unitech struck a Rs 6,120-crore deal with TTSL-Quippo. Tata Teleservices (TTSL) signed a passive infrastructure sharing deal with BSNL.
Businessworld
