­The Pakistan Telecommunication Authority (PTA) has signed a three-year Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) on infrastructure sharing with the country’s mobile network operators.The MoU signed by all five mobile operators aims at reviving up the current pace of infrastructure sharing among cellular mobile and WLL operators in the country and to increase the overall industry tenancy ratio to a reasonable mark.

According to the MoU, the network operators will aim to raise its own and overall industry’s tenancy ratio to a level of 1.5 within next 3 years with yearly benchmarks aimed at 1.1, and 1.3 for first and second years, respectively provided that the same is technically feasible for the operators.

It may be mentioned that tenancy ratio means number of operators sharing one tower. If a tower is used by more than one operator, it would improve the tenancy ratio, decreasing the number of towers installed across the country. Presently in Pakistan tenancy ratio is 1.02, which means out of every 100 towers only two are shared by operators. If the ratio increases to 1.5 as expected it would mean that 50 out of every 100 towers are shared by operators.