The pace of roll-out of cellular towers has declined significantly to just 8,000 a year compared with 14,000 in the previous financial year.According to data available with the Department of Telecom, over 40,000 new towers were added in 2009-10. While there were 3.47 lakh towers on March 2011, this is expected to move up to 3.55 lakh by the end of the current year, a growth of only 2.3 percent. In comparison, the year-on-year growth rate in 2008 was over 60 percent.
The slowdown is happening across all the tower companies.Bharti Infratel has added only 1,225 new towers between September 2010 and September 2011. Indus Towers, the joint venture between Airtel, Vodafone and Idea Cellular, rolled out 2,560 towers during the same period.The decline in roll-out has been largely due to failure of the new 2G operators to expand infrastructure and slow uptake of 3G services.
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