Verizon enters India's long distance market
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(InfoWorld) - Verizon Business, a unit of U.S. communications service provider Verizon Communications, has applied for a license to provide international long-distance services in India. The move reflects Verizon's recognition of the growth potential of Asian markets, Verizon Business said Wednesday. Leading multinational telecommunications services companies have applied for licenses to operate national and long-distance telecommunications services in India, to take advantage of a new policy that liberalized direct foreign investment in telecommunications services companies. Before the new policy, some multinational telecommunications services companies including Verizon were offering services in India through cooperation agreements with local licensed service providers. New government rules, announced in 2005, allow companies with foreign ownership of up to 74 percent to offer telecommunications services in the country. Before this rule, foreign investment was limited to 49 percent, which deterred foreign carriers from setting up operations in India. AT&T's majority-owned Indian joint venture, AT&T Global Network Services India was awarded licenses last year by the Indian government to operate national and international long distance telecommunications services from the country. AT&T holds 74 percent of the equity in the joint venture. BT Telecom India, an Indian joint venture of BT Group, applied to the Indian government in November for licenses to provide national and international long-distance services. The government awarded it letters of intent in December, as a first step to the award of licenses. As part of its expansion in India, BT announced Tuesday that it has signed an agreement for the acquisition of i2i Enterprise, a Mumbai-based enterprise services company specializing in IP (Internet Protocol) communications services for Indian and multinational companies. The acquisition would be through its Indian joint venture, BT said. I2i already has licenses to provide international and national long-distance services, Internet services, and Internet telephony services. Verizon is planning to offer its telecommunications services to multinational companies that are expanding in India, as well as Indian companies expanding abroad. It has set up a joint venture, Verizon Communications India, with India's Leo Communications, a part of the Videocon Group of Mumbai. Verizon will hold a 74 percent stake in the joint venture, while Leo will hold the balance 26 percent. Verizon Business is one of three operating units of Verizon Communications, and delivers IP, data, voice and wireless services to large business and government. In India, Verizon Business plans to offer a full range of services to multinational customers, including MPLS (Multiprotocol Label Switching), international private leased circuits and IP VPNs (virtual private networks).
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Indian outsourcers already have a large share of outsourced application development and maintenance and are dominant in business process outsourcing. The country is now targeting a larger share of the market for remote infrastructure management services (IMS), and is planning to more than double revenue from these services to $15 billion by 2013.
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Countries like India could become a source of profit, a panel of wireless industry figures says.
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Mobile phone users have outstripped traditional landline connections in India, according to the industry, marking a major lifestyle and communications milestone for the rapidly changing country.
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British mobile phone giant Vodafone agreed to buy an 11-billion-dollar controlling stake in India's Hutchison Essar in an attempt to move into the world's fastest-growing mobile phone market.
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Nortel scores its first major wireless deal with an Indian service provider.
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Verizon Communications Inc. on  Monday said it would buy long-distance telephone company MCI  Communications Inc. in a deal worth $6.75 billion, giving  Verizon a foothold in the market for serving large  corporations.
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British mobile-phone giant Vodafone's purchase of a 11.1-billion-dollar stake in India's Hutchison Essar has been welcomed by local contenders, smoothing its entry into the world's fastest-growing wireless market.
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(InfoWorld) - Sony Ericsson Mobile Communications A.B. is setting up a research and development (R&D) unit for mobile phones in Chennai in south India. The handset maker announced earlier this year that it was outsourcing its manufacturing to the Chennai operations of Flextronics Corp. and Hon Hai Precision Industry Co. Ltd., which uses the brand name Foxconn. By having R&D teams in India, the company will be better able to tap into consumer behavior in local markets, Sony Ericsson said Wednesday. A number of mobile phone vendors are setting up manufacturing, R&D centers, and network operating centers in India, both to take advantage of Indiaâs low-cost labor, and also to target Indiaâs booming mobile phone market. India added 6.57 million mobile telephony subscribers in May this year, taking the total number of subscribers to 178 million, according to the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI) in Delhi. This mobile telephony boom has translated into heavy demand for mobile phones. Over 62 million handsets have been sold in India in the last 12 months, according to internal estimates by Sony Ericsson. The company is targeting production of 10 million phones from India by 2009. The new facility will become part of Sony Ericssonâs global network of R&D units, currently comprised of sites in China, Japan, Sweden, the Netherlands, the U.S. and the U.K. The company did not, however, provide details of staffing or the nature of the work to be done at the new R&D facility.
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Reliance Communications, India's second-largest mobile operator, is seeking to raise as much as $1.5bn by listing its telecom infrastructure unit, in defiance of difficult conditions for fresh offerings after a sharp fall in stock markets.
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India has overtaken the US to become mobile phone giant Nokia's second largest sales market after China.
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Agreement with Verizon will allow deployment of a citywide wireless network.
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A number of Indian outsourcing companies, including Wipro, Infosys Technologies and Tata Consultancy Services, have software development operations in Chennai, India.
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MUMBAI, NOVEMBER 1: India Inc is stepping up acquisitions abroad. In its latest shopping abroad, Tata group firm Videsh Sanchar Nigam Ltd (VSNL) has signed an agreement to buy Bermuda-based Tyco Global Network
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(InfoWorld) - Some mobile phone companies are looking to emerging markets to find early adopters and for a glimpse at services of the future, CEOs said during the opening day keynote of theÂ 3GSM conferenceÂ in Barcelona on Tuesday. In Senegal, for example, customers eagerly use a mobile Internet TV service that includes a DVR (digital video recorder) feature. "It's more advanced than in many other places," said Sanjiv Ahuja, CEO of operator Orange. The keynote focused on the importance of emerging markets to the future of the mobile industry. That compares with last year's opening keynote, which focused largely on the potential of wireless content services. Vodafone Group's CEO Arun Sarin pointed to South Africa, where HSDPA (High Speed Downlink Packet Access) users make up 30 percent of the entire broadband market. That number is expected to increase to 50 percent by 2010, he said. Users in emerging markets are taking up such new technologies as mobile broadband because they don't have quality fixed-line networks, he said. The lack of quality landline networks may also be driving people in developing markets to exclusively use wireless, he said. In Europe, on average, 35 percent of phone usage is on mobile networks while in developing markets more than 50 percent of minutes are on mobile networks, he said. Naquib Sawaris, chairman and CEO of Orascom Telecom Holding, an operator offering services in Pakistan, Egypt, Algeria, and Iraq, put it most succinctly. "You have two Indians and an Egyptian on this stage: It's our time," he said. Sarin also commented onÂ Vodafone's recent winÂ of a controlling interest in Indian operator Hutchison Essar. Mobile phone penetration in India is around 13 percent and Sarin expects that to grow to 40 percent, or 500 million subscribers, in a few years. Indians like to talk too, with an average of 400 minutes of use per subscriber per month, he said. That compares to 150 minutes in Europe.
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BANGALORE, INDIA - An anticipated boom in mobile telephony use in India is attracting multinational and local companies to establish manufacturing operations in the country.
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(InfoWorld) - New research has confirmed that India's mobile phone market is set for a period of fast growth, with revenue from cellular services expected to jump by more than 18 percent each year for the next five years. Most of the growth will come from rural areas, where only 2 percent of the population have access to mobile phones today, said Madhusudan Gupta, senior research analyst at Gartner, which conducted the research. Service providers have already started to focus on rural markets, with aggressive rates and handsets priced at under $25, he said. Cellular service revenue in India will increase at a compound annual rate of 18.4 percent between this year and 2011, to reach $25.6 billion, Gartner estimated. Cellular revenue last year was $8.9 billion. As call rates fall from their current level of 2.6 cents per minute to rates comparable to fixed lines, which are about 0.9 cents per minute, a broad swathe of additional users will start using mobile phones, Gupta said. "The fixed-line infrastructure in India is not that good, which is giving enough of space for mobile wireless to move in," he said. Revenue from data will outpace that of voice services and contribute to about one fifth of revenue in 2011, more than double its share last year, although most of that growth will come from urban markets, Gartner said. As they expand into rural areas, operators will see their average revenue per user (ARPU) fall to $59.50 per year by 2011, from $82.1 last year. Successful operators will be those that make up for the falling ARPU through economies of scale, Gupta said. Operators are likely to collaborate by sharing infrastructure and outsourcing their network management to equipment vendors, and possibly system integrators, he added. For example, Bharti Airtel, a large Indian service provider, said Wednesday it had awarded a contract worth $2 billion over two-years to Telefonaktiebolaget LM Ericsson, to expand its network in rural areas and provide capacity management. The service providers should not be short of funds for expansion.Â Vodafone Group's acquisitionÂ in May of a controlling interest in the Indian operator Hutchison Essar, for $10.9 billion, has increased the valuation of all Indian service providers, and is helping them to attract private equity and other investments, Gupta said. The rural demand will come from businesses expanding into these areas, as well as from local businesses. Some individuals will own mobile phones, although the predominant model is likely to be a communally-owned handset, a concept already tried in some areas, Gupta said. India added 15.5 million mobile subscribers in the first quarter of this year, taking the total to 165.1 million, according to the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India. Gartner expects 58 percent of the rural population and 95 percent of the urban population to be covered by mobile networks by 2011. That year, the total number of mobile connections in India will have increased to more than 462 million, according to Gartner. India's total population at that time will be close to 1.2 billion, according to some estimates.