The comments submission deadline for the consultation paper titled ‘Use of Street furniture for small cell and aerial fiber deployment’, issued by the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI) on March 23, has been extended.

Earlier, the last date of receiving comments was fixed as April 20, 2022 and counter comments as May 4, 2022.

The regulator said Wednesday that keeping in view the requests received from stakeholders for extension of time for submission of comments and counter comments, the new dates areMay 11 and May 25, 2022, respectively.

The consultation paper on use of street furniture as props for telecom services was to explore how such utility products could be utilized to mount small cells and aerial fibers for providing telecom services as well.

Street furnitures are under various public and private authorities that have administrative jurisdictions in municipal bodies, smart city administrations, government departments, railways, airports, ports and metro train systems, stadia, etc. Granting access to street furniture by these controlling authorities could remove a significant hurdle in 5G small cell deployment in the country, TRAI had said.

In turn, when 5G services are deployed on infrastructure owned by these authorities, it creates a win-win situation for every party where the authorities too can benefit from 5G use cases like smart waste disposal, smart traffic light, smart metering, smart grid monitoring, disaster management, automation, energy management, new streams of revenue generation, etc.

The use of public street furniture will obviate the need to have greenfield deployment of towers or poles for sm cells and fiber, thus bringing down the capital expenditure and time involved for rolling out the networks and services. This sharing of infrastructure, amongst various entities, is also in sync with PM Gati Shakti initiative.