Reliance Communications has signed a seven-year full-scope managed services agreement with Ericsson to operate and manage their wireline and wireless networks across India.
Ericsson will also take over responsibility for the field maintenance, network operations and operational planning of RCOM’s 2G, CDMA and 3G mobile networks.
This strategic pan-Indian deal is an expansion of the firms’ existing agreement, which enables Ericsson to deepen its partnership with RCOM and extends its managed services footprint nationwide across all the 22 circles in India. This is the first pan-Indian managed services deal for Ericsson.
Ericsson will streamline RCOM’s operations by bringing all aspects of fibre, mobile networks and wireline access networks to the operator’s wireless and Global Enterprise Business, across differentiated product lines. The Swedish vendor will deliver world-class customer experience using Centralised Network Operations Centre and bring in operational efficiencies and optimisation using its global expertise.
Suresh Rangachar, Head of Commercial, Reliance Communications, said: “Given the complexity of networks and the growing performance expectations from customers, we are banking on the experience, innovation and technical expertise of Ericsson to improve the productivity of our network and ensure customer satisfaction and retention by delivering superior network performance and service quality at optimised costs."
Magnus Mandersson, Executive Vice President and Head of Business Unit Global Services, Ericsson, said; "The growing uptake in the use of new technologies requires an increased focus on customer experience management, and that will be our focus as we take on this mandate. This is the first pan-Indian managed services deal for Ericsson and will help us consolidate our managed services leadership in India".
RCOM’s infrastructure covers over 150,000 km of fibre, 2G/3G/CDMA mobile network, wireline access and enterprise network in 22 telecom circles, across India and includes 21,000 towns and 400,000 villages to which it offers converged services including voice, data and video.
