Hutchison Essar entered into a strategic alliance with Japan-based NTT DoCoMo on Friday to provide mobile Internet services to its customers.
DoCoMo will licence its patent technology 'imode' to Hutch for offering mobile internet on GSM, GPRS and WCDMA networks, Hutchison Essar Managing Director Asim Ghosh said.
The services would be launched next year. However, to access internet through the new technology, users would have to change their mobile handsets as the current phones in India do not have imode compatibility, he said.
"The new handsets will be priced competitively according to the Indian market," Ghosh said declining to reveal its exact price. The company would initially import imode-enabled handsets to the country, but is also open to talks with local handset manufacturers, he added.
"Imode has about 53 million subscribers in 16 countries and the content market for it is expanding at over $140 million per month," DoCoMo Senior Vice President and MD Multimedia Services Taksehi Natsuno said in New Delhi.
The cheapest imode handsets start at around $100 and the average usage in Japan is about $25 a month, he said.
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