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nasscom’s feedback on the Telecommunications Right of Way Rules, 2024
nasscom’s feedback on the Telecommunications Right of Way Rules, 2024

September 2, 2024

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In July 2024, Department of Telecommunications (DoT) had issued draft Telecommunications Right of Way Rules, 2024 (RoW Rules) under the Telecommunications Act 2023 for public consultation. We submitted our inputs on August 8, 2024

 

In pour submission we highlighted that the draft RoW Rules are meant to enhance EODB for facility providers seeking right of way for providing telecommunications network. However, in addition to facility providers, business enterprises like data centres (DCs) need access to right of way to expand its facility beyond one building/campus to a nearby location which is across a public road by linking them both using dark fibre. Given the rapid growth in digital traffic, cloud adoption, increased usage of time/latency-sensitive applications, and for scalability of inter-DC traffic, provision of dark fiber connectivity is of utmost importance. DCs are getting filled up and it is preferable to expand capacity by adding new DCs in nearby locations.

 

For this, a DC has to set up additional IT infrastructure (servers etc) in the nearby DC and then connect the IT set ups in the two DCs over LAN. In such scenarios, dark fiber connectivity could involve access to right of way.

 

Therefore, our recommendations were as follows:

 

  1. At present, while the RoW Rules acknowledges provision of telecommunication network, we recommend DoT to examine the need for specific reference to dark fiber within the scope of RoW Rules to facilitate provision of dark fibers connectivity between two DCs, where access to a public property is involved.

 

  1. In addition, we request the DoT to address an area of some ambiguity around provision of dark fiber by license service providers (LSPs) to DCs. For this, a clarification should be issued stating that Universal License (UL) access or UL-virtual network operator access and national long distance license holders can provide dark fiber to a DC customer.

 

Please see the attachment for our detailed submission and recommendations. For more details, please write to Vertika Misra at: vertika@nasscom.in and Sudipto Banerjee at: sudipto@nasscom.in with a copy to policy@nasscom.in.  


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2024_nasscom_response_RoW_Rules.pdf

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Vertika Misra
Director - Public Policy

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