A fascinating announcement from Peru’s Ministry of Transport and Communications (MTC) indicates that Peru and Korea are to cooperate on a project involving the sharing of telecommunications infrastructure.
The aim of the initiative is to reduce operation and maintenance costs in the deployment of telecommunications networks in Peru’s rural areas, for which Peru is presumably drawing on Korea’s vast experience in network rollouts.
MTC says it has established an agreement between Peru’s Ministry of Science and ICT (MSIT) and the Institute for the Development of the Information Society (KISDI) of Korea to work on the development of a telecommunications infrastructure sharing model that allows expanded coverage of services and improvement of service quality.
In particular the initiative is looking at the deployment of telecommunications networks in rural areas and solutions that can help to reduce the operation and maintenance costs that this implies. MTC says that in Peru, from 2019 to 2020, the number of base stations went from 22,967 to 24,050, with the highest growth in the regions of Lima, Callao and La Libertad, but there are still coverage issues.
Not surprisingly, the pandemic and the associated greater demands on networks have brought these issues into sharp focus. It’s hoped that the KISDI-supported study will make it possible to identify telecommunications infrastructure-sharing schemes to reduce the connectivity gap betwen rural and urban areas, through more efficient and profitable deployment models.