The Pune Metro has an underground route of around 5 km consisting of five underground stations where there is no service of telecommunication companies. (Express Photo)In a bid to augment the non-fare revenue of Pune Metro and to improve telecommunication services, Maharashtra Metro Rail Corporation has decided to lease out for 20 years spare optical fibre cable and additional space to telecom companies on its elevated as well as underground routes to install the same.
The Pune Metro has an underground route of around 5 km consisting of five underground stations where there is no service of telecommunication companies.
“The Maha Metro is establishing itself as an infrastructure provider. It plans to contribute to the telecommunication network of Pune Metro,” said an officer.
“The Maha Metro has decided to make Pune Metro financially more secure by undertaking to capture value from real estate and other non-fare revenue modes such as advertisements, co-branding, licensing of space. In such a manner, on one hand, it gives sustainable additional revenue to the corporation, and on the other hand, it will benefit businessmen, advertisers and service providers by providing innovative ways to fulfil their business requirements and needs,” the officer said.
“Pune Metro network passes through dense traffic areas and these are the most sought-after locations for having an optical fibre network for mobile operators. Maha Metro intends to license the spare fibres and space to bring additional mobile networks on the Pune Metro routes,” he added.
The contractor will have exclusive right to lay optical fibre cables on viaduct hangers and the side wall of the tunnels for 20 years and to lease services to telecom operators like Vodafone, Idea, Airtel, Jio and non-telecom operators for other needs like wireless internet.
At present, the Pune Metro is being executed on the North-South corridor from Pimpri-Chinchwad Municipal Corporation (PCMC) to Swargate and the East-West corridor from Vanaz to Ramwadi. The North-South line consists of Reach-1 and Reach-4 and includes all stations from the PCMC station to the Swargate station. Similarly, Reach– 2 and Reach– 3 are in the East-West line and include all stations from Vanaz to Ramwadi.
There are a total of 31 metro stations being developed on the 31-km route while there are plans to increase the metro rail network to over 150 km in the city.