Few Days ago, when I wrote about 80% of Indian Mobile Telephony being supported by Microwave backhaul and just 20% of Optical Fiber backhaul, I had told will come back with the deployments of microwave elements in Indian Sky.
In between 2005 and 2012, Indian companies which include Mobile Service Providers [Airtel, Vodafone, BSNL, etc] along with wireless network infrastructure facilitators [such as Tulip IT, Hughes Communication, HCL Comnet, etc] Educational & Research Institutions, etc together have deployed a whopping 2,102,781 Microwave Elements in Various Bands ranging from 800MHz to 14GHz or more. Purpose of Deployment could be Mobile Voice, Data, EVDO, Point to Point Communication, etc. Note that, Microwave Network Element is not Tower and is essentially a Transmitter / Receiver and one such tower could hold multiple elements for communication.
Bulk of this 2.1 Mn deployment is by the Indian Mobile Industry used for Wireless Voice & Data Services. I could not exclude the elements from the total tally of that of operators who shutdown operation in circles such as Uninor in Karnataka or Tata DoCoMo in North East India after having deployed the Elements in Telecom Network.
The Indian Government earned a Revenue of Rs210Cr [Rs2.1Bn] by authorizing the Installation of these Microwave Elements. I have mixed feelings about this heavy Microwave deployment as it connects people but probably comes at the cost of radiation impact in the long term. Anybody has Authentic data on the Study of Radiations in Indian Towns & Cities ?