RIL’s arm, Bharti Airtel enter into telecom infrastructure sharing arrangement

Reliance Industries Ltd. | Refineries | Oil & Gas | BSE: 500325 | NSE: RELIANCE

11 Dec 2013 Evaluate

Reliance Industries (RIL) arm - Reliance Jio Infocomm and Bharti Airtel have entered into a comprehensive telecom infrastructure sharing arrangement under which they will share infrastructure created by both parties. This will include optic fibre network - inter and intra city, submarine cable networks, towers and internet broadband services and other such opportunities identified in the future. The cooperation is aimed at avoiding duplication of infrastructure, wherever possible, and to preserve capital and the environment. This will also provide redundancy in order to ensure seamless services to customers of the respective parties.

The arrangement could, in future, be extended to Roaming on 2G, 3G and 4G, and any other mutually benefiting areas relating to telecommunication, including but not limited to jointly laying optic fibre or other forms of infrastructure services. The pricing would be at arm’s length, based on the prevailing market rates. As part of this arrangement, Bharti Airtel and Reliance Jio have already announced an agreement under which Bharti Airtel has provided capacity on its i2i submarine cable to Reliance Jio.

Reliance Jio Infocomm holds Universal Service License and is the only pan India operator with Broadband Wireless Access (BWA) spectrum across 22 circles capable of offering fourth generation (4G) LTE wireless services.