Three of India’s largest operators have forged a 3G roaming agreement to expand their coverage across more of the country’s telecom circles.
The agreement between Aircel, Reliance Communications (RCom) and Tata Teleservices allows each operator’s customers access to their rivals’ networks. For Aircel and TTSL, this means access to the highly desirable Delhi and Mumbai circles where RCom holds licences, while RCom in turn can expand its coverage to Andhra Pradesh, Karnataka, Kerala , Tamil Nadu and UP East.
Gurdeep Singh, CEO of RCom’s consumer business, said: “These alliances will further consolidate RCom’s position as the leading data operator in the country and will help the company improve its post-paid and corporate customer market share.”
RCom, which is the number four operator in India, reported a 31.2% increase in data subscribers at the end of Q4 2013,up to 36.2 million. Of these, 11 million were 3G subscribers. However, by March the operator had reported added a further 5 million 3G connections, making it the country’s second largest 3G provider after BSNL (which has 19.6 million subscribers).
TTSL is not far behind RCom with 14.4 million 3G connections, while Aircel lags with 1.9 million.
