TTSL to spread wings in 12 new circles by Oct

Tata Teleservices Ltd (TTSL), the wholly owned telecom company of the Tata group, will roll out its services in 12 new circles beginning October 2004.

It had acquired the licenses of these circles early this year. It currently operates in 8 circles and intends to have presence in over 1,000 towns across 20 circles by next year.

Amit Bose, president-telecom, Tata Teleservices, said, "The company is expanding its coverage across existing circles. Almost four cities are connected every day. In the last three months, our coverage has grown from 50 towns to nearly 200 in the existing circles. We will reach to over 1,000 towns in 20 circles which will contribute close to 95 per cent of our total revenues."

The company had acquired a universal access service license for 12 new circles - Bihar, Haryana, Himachal Pradesh, Kerala, Kolkata, Madhya Pradesh, Orissa, Punjab, Rajasthan, Uttar Pradesh (East), Uttar Pradesh (West) and West Bengal.

The Tata group is investing an additional Rs 9,000 crore in the next two years in the telecom sector. However, the investment in TTSL as of March 2004 stood at Rs 5,995 crore.

TTSL is also increasing its range of data services and is adding a range of handsets for customers. Currently, Tata Indicom customers can choose from only three different brands of handsets.

As part of its data services, the company is introducing games on Brew platform in all circles from August. Earlier, the company introduced the Push-To-Talk service as part of its package for corporates in Bangalore and will soon be rolling out this service in other circles.

Meanwhile, Tata Teleservices has crossed a total customer base of 2 million.

"In June, our incremental market share in case of mobile services stood at 22 per cent," Bose indicated.

Its Tata Indicom brand currently has a presence in eight circles - Andhra Pradesh, Chennai, Gujarat, Karnataka, Maharashtra, Mumbai, New Delhi and Tamil Nadu under the code division multiple access (CDMA) technology.

It has partnered with international telecom giants such as Motorola, Ericsson, Lucent and ECI Telecom for the deployment of a technologically advanced network.

TTSL is also into public booth telephony and wireline services and it also provides other value added services such as voice portal, roaming, post-paid Internet services, 3-way conferencing, CUG, Wi-Fi Internet services and data services.