What were some of the accomplishments of FY 2004–05?
For TTSL, the fiscal 2004–05, was an eventful one. We entered the prepaid segment in all 20 circles. With our scheme, the Indian prepaid customers can get 1-second pulse and full talktime on pre-paid.

We launched our operations in 12 new circles. It was the fastest ever roll out operations by any telecom operator and also crossed four million customers. Tata Teleservices crossed two million fixed wireless customers-world's largest FWP customer base.

And, we aim to achieve market leadership in the next three to five years with superior services at affordable tariffs across all products categories and services to the telecom consumers in India.

What is your broadband strategy?
We don't want to remain a telecom-only player. Broadband and Internet are also strong focus areas for us. While telecom is the fastest growing market, we believe that broadband will also offer a huge market in the next two or three years.

We are focused on attaining leadership in the mobility space. VSNL is well positioned for market leadership in conventional broadband and we will cooperate with VSNL under the Indicom brand to meet customers' needs. Finally, we believe that EV-DO will fulfill many broadband requirements with the huge benefit of being wireless. Introduction of 3G services is very exciting in this area.

What's your plan for deployment of CDMA 20001x EV-DO?
As the market is becoming mature and data focused, the CDMA business is going to grow rapidly. We are planning to introduce high-speed wireless data services by deploying CDMA 2000 1x EVDO, which will enable peak data speeds up to 2.4 Mbps.

How do you plan to be among top three companies in India?
We have migrated to UASL and have applied for it in the 12 new circles.

Our vendors say that the rollout of our pan-India network was perhaps the fastest telecom network rolled out in the world. All I can say is, we successfully achieved a pan-India presence in the planned time frame. Today, we are present in more than 1,400 towns and have excellent branded retail presence across the country. We are adding significant numbers of new customers each month, our market shares and customer base has been displaying steady growth. Clearly, the value proposition we offer is appealing to a large number of mobile and fixed phone customers.

In a nutshell, it has been a very well-coordinated effort across all functional areas of the company which, going forward, will strive towards the leadership position in the years ahead.

What is the vision and strategy to be amongst the leaders?
The launch of our new circles happened over the last three to four months. As many as 22 percent of new subscribers, during this period, opted for Tata Indicom. We believe, Tata Indicom would be in a position to meet the telephony needs of 25 percent of the telecom subscribers in the country. 

Page(s)   1  2