PowerGrid gets unified licence to offer telecom services

State-owned Power Grid Corporation has been granted unified licence with national long distance and Internet service provider authorisation to provide telecom services. The power transmission utility provides its telecom towers and optical fibre cable infrastructure (for Internet services) to service providers and other firms for commercial use. This is a separate segment of revenue for the company. "The Department of Telecommunication has granted a unified licence to PowerGrid with national long distance (NLD) and Internet service provider-Category A service authorisation for providing telecom services.

The licence is valid for 20 years," PowerGrid said in a BSE filing on Tuesday. A senior official said PowerGrid has been in the business of telecom infrastructure for business to business services. Earlier, the company had two separate licences of infrastructure provider-1 (IP-1) and national long distance-1 (NLD-1), which is due to expire. Now, the company has got a single unified licence. The official said the company has also built it optical fibre network through overhead cables using its huge network of power transmission infrastructure across the country. During April-December of 2016-17, the company had received an income of Rs 371 crore from the telecom segment, 29 per cent higher than the year-ago period. The firm is mainly into power transmission business.