Going by application dates, companies like Spice, Birla-promoted Idea Cellular, Reliance Communications (through Swan and Cheetah) and Hindustan Futuristic are in the lead for licences in different circles. The only new player in the list is the little-known ByCell.Several incumbents like Idea Cellular, Maxis-Aircell, owned by a Malaysian promoter, and Vodafone-Essar lead the list of applicants for initial spectrum allocation since they already hold licences.
Reliance has around 90,000 telecom towers now, half of which are operational and owned by the RIL and rest on lease.
Bharat Sanchar Nigam Ltd (BSNL) has received permission to offer CDMA services across the country (except Delhi and Mumbai) under the crossover technology policy. Under the policy, existing GSM operators are allowed to offer CDMA service and vice versa within the same licence after paying a fee.BSNL is the third company after Reliance Communications (which is in CDMA and wanted to operate GSM service) and Tata Teleservices (similar to Reliance) which has been given licences
Programmes offers pared-down web services on mobile phones along with Facebook' s own social network and messaging services cost free
Vodafone, one of the largest GSM operators, had said that service providers like itself and "Bharti pay the highest spectrum charges per MHz to department of telecommunications compared to others. . .
Reliance Big TV, a subsidiary of Reliance Communications, will offer 202 channels initially and increase the bouque to 330-350 over a period of time, company CEO Arun Kapoor said in Mumbai on Tuesday.
Nokia, that has already begun manufacturing of 5G equipment at its Chennai plant, is also readying for exporting the products to several key markets like the US.
However, operators said the chief beneficiary would be the state-owned Bharat Sanchar Nigam Ltd and Mahanagar Telephone Nigam Ltd, which have already been given the spectrum for 3G services, as well as Reliance Communications, which is still to roll out its 2G GSM network.
In a blow to GSM operators, who have been demanding that auditor CAG be stopped from vetting their account books, tribunal TDSAT has declined an interim relief, saying it had no powers to intervene.
Anil Ambani's Reliance Communication on Sunday launched GSM services in Mumbai and offered free talk-time worth Rs 900 spread over three months. "New subscribers would get Rs 10 talk-time every day for the first 90 days and we have offered tariffs of Re 1 a minute for local calls. STD would cost Rs 1.50 per minute on any network," Dinesh Gulati, the head of Western region, said. After consuming Rs 10 during the day, the subscribers can use top up cards.
The Department of Telecommunications has received 21 bids from telecom operators and infrastructure service providers for the Rs 2,395 crore (Rs 23.95 billion) rural telephony project.
Reliance Communications, India's second-largest wireless operator, will launch phone services in Uganda by year-end, marking its first foray into international mobile phone markets.
Flag Telecom, a subsidiary of Reliance Communications, has signed a $100 million
Falcon, which is owned by Flag Telecom, has been damaged in the Middle East but it is unlikely to affect Net operations across India.
To be the first firm to take advantage of new RBI ruling.
Anil Ambani severely criticised the attitude of GSM operators and raised the issue of returning the extra spectrum again.
The 3G spectrum auction evoked an excellent response from mobile operators on day one on Friday, with the reserve price of Rs 3,500 crore (Rs 35 billion) for pan-India operations escalating nearly 12 per cent to Rs 3,913.81 crore (Rs 39.138 billion).
There are nine mobile operators, including the big six that would bid for the 3-4 slots on offer.
BPO and IT services across India remained largely unaffected.
With the existing operators garnering the high-average revenue per user subscriber, new service providers like RCom has to look at new customers," Gartner principal research analyst Naresh Singh said.
With Bharti Airtel making it to the list of top-ten advertisers of the year, cellular phone service providers as a category have overthrown fast moving consumer goods (FMCG) products such as toilet soaps and shampoos to emerge as the top advertising category on television in 2007.
Telcos may have begun their WiMAX rollouts, but the results are yet to show. Consider this. Tata Teleservices which deployed its first WiMAX network in Bangalore in March, and is expecting to gather a subcsriber base of about 2 lakh by the end of the year, has enrolled just about 7,000 customers in the city.
As is common practice of key parties associated with high-profile M&A deals being referred to by code names, this time around, Reliance has reportedly become 'Rome', MTN is 'Madrid' and Ambani is 'Apollo'.
Bangalore-based Healthcare Magic, a first-of-its-kind, real-time, medical consultation portal, will soon tie up with Reliance Communications, the country's second-largest mobile service provider, to launch a Doc On Call service by December this year. Any call made to Healthcare Magic will be attended by a doctor on duty at the the company's Bangalore office.
In his third letter in the last one month to Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, Reliance Communications chairman Anil Ambani has lambasted GSM operators.
Upping the ante in the ongoing spectrum war, Reliance Communications chairman Anil Ambani has shot off a missive to the Department of Telecommunications (DoT), accusing GSM operators of having cornered spectrum under the valuable 900 MHz.
Flag Telecom was looking at divesting up to 20 per cent of its equity stake through an international convertible bond issue and raise over $200 million.
In his letter dated October 19, Anil Ambani points out that while the top three GSM players -- Bharti, Vodafone-Essar and Idea Cellular -- have acquired an additional 52 million subscribers in the past few years without allocation of any additional spectrum, something they have constantly told the government that they do not have sufficiently.
Reliance Telecom, a subsidiary of Reliance Communiations, on Friday announced a unique recharge scheme for its prepaid GSM customers who could avail of free ''double on net minutes and built-in talktime'' on top-up vouchers of Rs 10.
Prime Minister Manmohan Singh is believed to have left it to telecom minister A Raja to resolve the tangle over allocation of spectrum, an issue that has brought industry bigwigs like Reliance Communications' Anil Ambani and Bharti Airtel's Sunil Mittal face to face.
NXP (Next eXPerience) Semiconductors, the new semiconductor company founded by Philips, is partnering with mobile communication service provider Reliance Communications to bring out low cost handsets in India
For sometime, satellite-based management education has come to the aid of senior managers who never went to a business school.
The seven listed companies of the Anil Ambani Group, led by Reliance Power and RCom, made their investors wealthier by Rs 16,969 crore.
Reliance Communications Ltd's subsidiary Reliance Mobile World on Wednesday announced introduction of LPG gas booking service on mobile phones.
The total revenues and net profit of the top six Indian telecom players, Bharti Airtel, Reliance Communications, BSNL, Hutchison Essar, MTNL and Idea Cellular, more than doubled during the last two years.
From a policy point of view, India's telecom industry is getting exciting once again. After a lull of a few years, we're back to the same half-truths from regulators/policy makers, and the all too familiar attempts to help favoured firms.
Powered by surging markets, seven companies, Reliance Communications (R-Com) and stock market debutant DLF among them, have joined the Rs 1 trillion (Rs 1,00,000 crore) club in terms of market capitalisation. New entrants are hard-core engineering and mining companies like National Mineral Development Corporation (NMDC) and Bhel - both in the public sector - and L & T. Bharti Airtel, SBI and ICICI Bank are other entrants.
Ajit Mishra, vice president, Research, Religare Broking, answers your queries
It means a CDMA players like Reliance can also operate GSM services and get the required spectrum from the government within the same licence. Earlier, they were allowed spectrum either for CDMA or for GSM within the licence. However, now they have to pay an amount equal to the entry fee of a UASL licence (over Rs 1,680 crore for a pan-India licence) to get the spectrum as recommended by the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India.
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