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Telcos should make sure their infrastructure is used for smart cities: RJio ex-president

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Krishna Mukherjee
New Update
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NEW DELHI: The smart city projects serve a huge opportunity for telcos but they should make sure that their infrastructure is available for the projects, says Reliance Jio ex-president Sumit D Chowdhury, who is currently working on GAIA smart cities initiative.

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“If telcos don’t share their infrastructure, including spectrum, they will be left with a zero. They have to sell just like any other commercial operations...Their participation will come as a provider of connectivity,” he said on the sidelines of the ‘smart-sustainable cities’ summit here.

Talking about his initiative--GAIA smart cities, he said that at present “we are setting up different infrastructure projects. We are integrating with private players for water supply, power and we are not using government money. Besides, smart infrastructure, we are also going to create the connectivity infrastructure, information aggregation, bringing all these data together and then allow people to make smart decisions out of it.”

On creating a regulatory body for such projects, he said that there should not be any body for smart cities as with a body “you will have more bureaucracy, more people trying to tell you what it should be...nobody can tell you what a smart city should be.”

Chowdhury further said: “Smart Cities is a journey, not a destination. Allocation of Rs 70 crores for creating each smart city is not adequate at all. Smartness has to be built-in in every project covering from traffic to housing to transportation to lighting to waste management amongst many others.”

With GAIA, Chowdhury is merging three India-based companies operational in the smart city and Machine to Machine (M2M) space.

On higher spectrum prices, he said that the telcos are left with no options and so, in the future they have to pass on the burden to end-conumers.

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