Koshika To Negotiate Bilateral Pacts For Roaming Facilities

Usha group's Koshika Telecom has announced that it will negotiate bilateral agreements with all cellular operators in India to provide roaming capability to its subscribers. Koshika which holds cellular licences for Uttar Pradesh (West and East), Bihar and Orissa pulled out of the national roaming consortium, Global Connect, last week.

National roaming enables GSM (group speciale mobile, the digital standard chosen by India) cellular subscribers to be reached anywhere in India provided they are in a place covered by the service. For this, network operators have to sign bilateral agreements on issues like revenue sharing or enter consortia like Global Connect and World One.

 

Speaking to newspersons here on Saturday, Koshika CEO A K Chaudhdri said the company would launch cellular services in the four circles as soon as it got the go-ahead from the DoT. Officials at the telecom engineering centre are testing the network for allowing it to interconnect to DoT network, company executives said.

In a bid to attract subscribers, Koshika announced a scheme by which a subscriber would be billed only Rs 1.35 per minute of calling. It had surprised the cellular industry when it declared its intentions to bill customers at Rs 2.70 a minute some months back.

Koshika intends to charge Rs 2.70 per minute for both outgoing and incoming calls between 6 am and 9 pm. During the non-peak hours between 9 pm and 6 am, it will charge Rs 0.90 a minute which will apply only to outgoing calls. Incoming calls during these hours will be free. Other cellular operators intend to charge Rs 8.40 or Rs 16.80 a minute depending on hour of calling.

Koshika director Vineet C Rai said, We are looking at long-term gains through bulk sales and higher airtime usage of our service compared to other cellular operators who are offering high airtime rates. Executives claimed that they have 9,000 paid bookings already. They clarified that the company was not subsidising cellular handsets at the moment.