The Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI) on Wednesday issued a consultation paper on “Use of street furniture for small cell and aerial fiber deployment” for telecom services.

Street furniture like utility poles, billboards, lamp posts, traffic signals, and public structures like gazebos and bus stops provide utility services to city dwellers, but with little or no change can also be utilized to mount small cells and aerial fibers for providing telecom services as well.

Street furniture 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, stadiums, etc. Granting access to street furniture by these controlling authorities could remove a significant hurdle in 5G small cell deployment in the country, TRAI 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 small 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.

The aspects that need to be considered for the deployment of small cells on street furniture include identifying the suitable street furniture based on availability of backhaul and power, deployment heights, load bearing capabilities, scalability and other concerns related to local approvals.

With this background, the Authority, through the consultation paper, intends to seek the inputs of stakeholders on issues related to outdoor small cell and aerial fiber deployment using street furniture for the successful rollout of next generation networks in the country.