Tata Tele plans to quadruple its nationwide coverage by March '05

Targets 2,000 towns from current 500 by March 2005

Tata Teleservices Limited is planning to quadruple its nationwide coverage to around 2,000 towns from the current 500 towns by March 2005.

The telecom service provider has acquired licences to operate in 12 more circles, apart from the existing eight. Bihar, Haryana, Kolkata, Madhya Pradesh, Orissa, Punjab, Kerala, Rajasthan, Uttar Pradesh, Himachal Pradesh and West Bengal are the new markets that it plans to enter soon. It currently has a customer base of 22.5 lakh.

"We plan to increase our coverage to about 169 towns in Andhra Pradesh from the current 114, by December 2005. Some of the new towns that we plan to cover in November this year will be Bobbili, Srisailam, Mahanadi, Nandyal, Kurnool and Karimnagar," Sanjeev Malhotra, general manager, central marketing and retail business, Tata Teleservices Limited, told Business Standard.

The revenues of Tata Teleservices from Andhra Pradesh were about Rs 300 crore for 2003-04, he added.

Tata Teleservices currently has a subscriber base of about five lakh in Andhra Pradesh. The proposed moves are targeted towards increasing the base to 10 lakh by the end of the current fiscal, Malhotra said, on the sidelines of a press conference organised to launch its Single Rate Plan for its post-paid mobile customers.

Prabhat Pani, COO, Andhra Pradesh and Karnataka circles, Tata Teleservices, said that based on customer response, the service provider decided to launch a single rate plan with a monthly rental of Rs 199, to avoid confusion for customers with different tariff plans.

"We are offering a usage-based discount ranging from 5 per cent to 20 per cent for our customers whose calls exceed 300," Pani said.

Besides, we will also offer add-on services where a customer who pays a monthly rental of Rs 249 will be charged at the rate of 40 paise per minute for all local Tata-to-Tata calls, he added.

Tata Teleservices is also launching a range of handsets like LG 5235, Nokia 6225, Nokia 6585 and Nokia 2112, besides slashing the rates of existing handsets.