Norwegian firm Telenor enters India with 29p per minute plan
www.WirelessFederation.com/news: Moving one step ahead of the pay per second system, Norway-based firm Telenor, entered Indian market with 29 paise per minute plan under the brand name Uninor. The company has tied up with India’s Unitech Group and will be launched in seven circles — UP (East), Tamil Nadu, Karnataka, Kerala, Andhra Pradesh, UP (West) and Bihar.
According to the CEO and President of Telenor group, Jon Fredrik Baksaas, the new plan offers more value for money to the users as the consumers want something more than the usual features. The pay per second billing was first launched by TATA DoCoMo, followed by other operators.
According to Unitech Wireless Managing Director Stein-Erik Vellan, the company’s target is to occupy 8% of the market share by 2018 and operate cash-flow break-even in five years.
Besides, the company also expects that the average revenue per user (ARPU) becomes lower than the industry level in the near term. However, Unitech is susceptible about bidding in the 3G auction but at the same time it has made it clear that it will surely not bid for an all India license.
Cell site sharing to cut costs for mobile firms
NEW DELHI, OCT 29: Reliance Communications, Bharti Airtel, Aircel and Spice Telecom are in advanced stages of talks to share each other’s existing cell site across the country. The move comes soon after a similar agreement was signed between Reliance, Hutch-Essar and Idea Cellular. Currently, all operators in India have a total of 35,000 cell sites in India. The number is projected to go up to 1 lakh by 2010.
Early this year, mobile operators had reached an agreement to share future cell site infrastructure to reduce costs and also overcome space crunch. Four new pilot cell site projects on a shared basis in Delhi were inaugurated by communications and IT minister Dayanidhi Maran a few months back.
Industry sources told FE that as all the operators were looking at pan-India rollout, sharing existing cell sites would enable a faster roll-out and bring about considerable savings in their capital and operating expenditure in a market marked by declining tariff.
The major gainers will be Reliance which has aggressive plans to roll out GSM services in 21 circles for which it has applied for GSM spectrum. Aircel also will gain as it has also applied for licences for almost all the circles and recently was given letter of intent for seven circles.
Idea is also looking for expansion. It has got the licence for Mumbai circle and would soon roll out services there. Bharti Airtel has plans to reach out to all 5,200 census towns in the country and such a sharing deal would help it in faster roll-out.
The benefits of sharing existing cell site infrastructure are easily visible. For instance, the recent Reliance-Hutch deal enables the former to share 16,000 sites of Hutch across 13 circles. With Idea, Reliance will be able to share its 7,000 sites across 11 circles. Similarly, Hutch and Idea will have access to Reliance’s sites in 21 circles.
Apart from saving on capex and opex and faster roll-out, the move would also add a revenue stream for companies as they would charge rental for sharing the cell sites.
Source- http://www.financialexpress.com
