Indian Telecom Industry

In telecom front, Pak is greener than India

NEW DELHI, INDIA: Even as the global environment NGO Greenpeace is on a campaign urging Indian telecom giant Bharti Airtel to adopt a green policy to bring down carbon emissions, neighboring Pakistan has apparently gone much ahead in the 'green path' in the telecom front by adopting green technologies within the industry.

Fortunately, the Indian telecom sector is not shying away, and admits that the telecom industry in the terror-torn neighboring country is much better than its Indian counterpart when it comes to green adoption.

An industry veteran on conditions of anonymity said that while we debate on the feasibility of adopting solar energy, the neighboring country is much ahead in its deployment.

Over the past couple of years, Pakistan has deployed solar-powered BTS in its rural areas. As part of a global initiative, Telenor Pakistan, a subsidiary of Norway’s Telenor, is committed to cut drastic carbon emissions by 2011. The mobile operator is expected to reduce carbon footprint by up to 40 per cent by 2017.

Telenor Pakistan has already forged a contract with Nokia Siemens Networks to procure equipment for off-grid sites to harvest solar energy, and is committed to deploy it for the new sites. In 2008, Pakistan’s Warid Telecom had become the first to deploy the solar-powered macro base station (BTS) in the country.

Speaking to CIOL, J Gopal, Advisor (Technical), DoT said that India’s telecom firms will definitely go green in the days to come. Given the fact of vast geographical area in the country, Gopal said, “We will emulate the similar process in the country but will adopt it gradually.”

TRAI has already recommended the telecom sector to deploy green technologies, he said.

“We’ll contemplate the process that the telecom sector in India will deploy similar solar solution for the entire rural region,” Gopal added.

Nearly 80 per cent of energy in a mobile telecommunication network is consumed by base stations. As per an estimate by GSMA, more than 75,000 new off-grid sites will be built each year through 2012 in developing countries.

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One reason for the lack of significant efforts or investments in equipment manufacturing is a lack of government support. Unlike the IT services industry, which has been offered various incentives such as extended tax holidays and exemptions for exports, very little has been done to aid telecom manufacturing companies (other than sporadically imposing import duties on telecom equipment and temporarily banning Chinese manufacturers’ equipment ). This has been achieved through a combination of programs to develop and test new technologies in the country and initiatives such as tax breaks and providing loans at nominal interest rates. These companies also took advantage of these low cost loans to make huge investments in R&D. Huawei spends up to 10% of its investments on R&D in order to compete in the fast changing telecom environment. Huawei has also received close to $10 million in research funding from Chinese government since 2003.

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