DICT issues rules on common towers

The Department of Information and Communications (DICT) on Friday released its rules on the rollout of its common tower initiative.

In the guidelines, the DICT identified 2,500 sites which are owned by the agency, by the government, and hard-to-access areas identified by telcos PLDT and Globe.

To fast-track the rollout of common towers, the list of the 2,500 identified areas will be given to the independent tower companies (ITCs), which have entered memorandum of understanding with the agency and telcos.

This will allow ITCs and telcos to conduct surveys of the sites for possible commercial agreements.

The DICT, so far, entered MOUs with 22 tower firms for the common tower initiative.

“This is the starting point of more comprehensive policy for our initiative on passive infrastructure sharing. This will help tower firms to acquaint themselves in our telco industry,” DICT Acting Secretary Eliseo Rio Jr. said.

The rules on common tower sharing are anchored on encouraging investment and build more towers in the unserved and underserved areas, Rio said.

"This will also avoid inefficient duplication of network resources, redundancy of permits and high cost of operations," he said.

The Philippines lags behind neighboring countries in terms of the number of existing cell sites, having only 16,000 compared with Malaysia and Indonesia’s 25,000 and 90,000 towers, respectively, according to the DICT.

The common tower initiative is seen to free up the telcos from building tower since they can simply lease the facilities from a tower company. Such arrangement could potentially reduce prices of telecommunications service in the country. — MDM, GMA News