Eaton Telecom, a pan-African communications tower company, is pushing the idea of tower-sharing as way to bring an end to clashes among service providers and governments over how best to bring service to remote areas.Eaton plans to build telecom towers in several countries across Africa.The company will build, own and manage telecom towers in African countries, and claims to offer substantial growth potential for mobile communications. The towers are designed to be shared by multiple service providers, and Eaton will in turn collect revenue from providers for using the towers. Eaton will also be collecting revenue from providers for maintaining the towers. In Zambia as in many other Eastern and Southern Africa, telecom operators refuse to share their communication infrastructure, claiming it would be difficult to maintain quality assurance.Service providers also compete for customers, and they claim that sharing of infrastructure stifle competition and innovation. But as providers in the region are seeking to reduce the cost of network rollout, Eaton officials say that shared towers will make it easy for them to introduce news services."Infrastructure sharing is the only way to solve Zambia's telecom sector because a few kilometers away from the capital city, there is no network for some service providers," said Batuke Imenda, chairman of the parliamentary committee on Communication, Transport, Works and Supply. Zambia is pushing telecom companies to start sharing towers.Eaton, a U.K.-based company, has now expanded its operations in Tanzania in addition to the already existing South Africa and Ghana operations. As most providers in the region are struggling to maintain their base stations, Eaton also intends to buy stations from providers, maintain them and then allow operators to share them.In Tanzania, Eaton is targeting Vodacom, Tigo, Zantel, Rural Netco and Smile, among other operators. Despite having eight operators, Tanzania only has 17 million mobile phone subscribers out of 43 million people because operator have been slow to expand their services.Most service providers in Africa have been refusing to roll-out their network to remote areas, claiming low returns on their investments.In addition, African governments have been refusing to grant operators tax holidays on equipment for expansion of services to remote areas. Although sharing infrastructure helps operators reduce operation costs, it has a number of drawbacks. Among them: competitive operators are able to emerge more easily as no additional money for network expansion is required.