It's make or break year for integrated operators in India. The one who succeeds will be the winners in the phase II of expansion, since the focus is on expanding services to newer geographies. The focus is also on expanding rural coverage as India has a large rural population. All this will not only help in increasing mobile coverage from about 60% to close to 90% by the end of March 2008, it will also help in achieving the 500 mn lines target by 2010.

The integrated operators have massive expansion plans. Bharti Airtel is planning to expand from 4,676 census towns and over 200,000 non-census towns and villages to cover all census towns in FY '08. Plans are also on for 70% coverage by the end of 2008.

BSNL has massive expansion plans. It plans to increase mobile coverage in 1,000 more cities and also a large number of villages. BSNL already has a good state and national highway coverage and this will further improve with a 31.6 mn line addition.

Reliance Communications is planning to expand from 10,000 towns and 300,000 villages to 23,000 towns and 600,000 villages. The company is also planning to cover every single habitation with a population of over 1,000 by the end of 2008. And, by the end of the year, Reliance Communications plans to cover 85% of the population. Spice has also opted for wireless expansion in the Karnataka and Punjab circles.

July 2007 was a landmark month for Indian telecom with Indian service providers announcing deals worth Rs 20,680 crore ($5.04 bn) in the mobile and fixed line space. Majority of the deals are from wireless.

The Operators
Bharti Airtel, the number one operator has reached a base of 42.7 mn mobile susbcribers and plans to reach 100 mn plus by 2010. Having already established a base of 39,000 BTS, the company plans to add around 30,000 base stations this fiscal.

Bharti also plans to increase its NLD network by another 20,000–25,000 km. All this will result in a capex investment of around $3.5 bn in FY '08.

Bharti Airtel has recently awarded Ericsson an estimated $2 bn expansion contract, including expansion of its GSM/EDGE network and also capacity management for 15 circles. Under the two-year supply and services contract, Ericsson will design, plan, deploy, optimize and manage Bharti Airtel's GSM network and also take care of pre-paid platform for innovative prepaid services across all twenty-circle circles. In addition, Ericsson will also deliver pan-India integrated device management solutions for mobile customers.

The core network is based on Ericsson's layered architecture paving way for an all-IP network. It includes a common 2G/3G core based on mobile softswitch. Ericsson will deploy the Flamingo series radio base station and Expander solution will be deployed for expansion in rural markets.

Apart from the Ericsson deal, Bharti Airtel has also signed an MoU with Nokia Siemens Network worth $900 mn for expansion across Airtel's mobile, fixed and Intelligent Network platforms. In the first of its kind multi platform network contract, Nokia Siemens Networks will expand Airtel's GSM network in eight circles. The contract will also deploy 1.8 mn NGN ports for NLD and ILD networks and will increase international calling card prepaid service capacity by 4.5 mn. The GSM and NGN expansions are planned for two years whereas international calling cards expansion is for three years.

The two year GSM expansion will cover the eight existing circles of Mumbai, Maharashtra, Goa, Gujarat, Madhya Pradesh, Chattisgarh, Bihar and Jharkhand, Orissa, and West Bengal, where Nokia Siemens Networks already provide equipment and managed services. Nokia Siemens Networks will deploy the latest state of the art GSM equipment such as Flexi Edge and Ultrasite BTS, BSC3i, 3GPP-based mobile softswitching solutions including 3G capable MSC servers and media gateways, and transmission network including PDH and SDH.

On the NGN front, Nokia Siemens Networks will deploy complete IP trunking solutions with SURPASS hiE 9200 softswitches, SURPASS hiG 1200 media gateways and SURPASS hiR 200 media servers. The international calling cards services expansion will see Bharti quadruple its capacity and adequately address its calling card business expansion to tap more international markets.