Tatas' tryst with telecom: A saga of missed calls, wrong technology choices

From a subscriber market share that climbed from just over 9% in Dec 2008 to 11.5% in Aug 2010, TTSL saw its share fall to 7.7% by Feb 2013

Tata Teleservices has decided to merge its consumer mobile business with Bharti Airtel in a deal that will require the latter to pay only Rs 1,500 crore of spectrum fees. This effectively means an almost complete exit of the Tatas’ from the telecom business – after a long list of mis-steps, wrong technology choices and bets that boomeranged on them.

To begin with, the Tatas placed their telecom bets between GSM and CDMA, the technology pushed by Qualcomm that promised efficient use of spectrum combined with the possibility of high-speed data. That would have been alright had it not been