Parliament Lens On Reliance Communications Over Claims

[Arun 795]

DNAindia.com

Nivedita Mookerji

Thursday, November 23, 2006 21:27 IST

New Delhi

The Anil Ambani-controlled Reliance Communications’ campaign, claiming to be the youngest, largest and fastest telecom company in the country, is under scrutiny in Parliament.

Rajya Sabha MP Janardhan Poojary wanted to know whether “a private telecom company that is hardly three to four years old can proudly claim as the youngest and largest.”

Stating that Reliance Communications (earlier Reliance Infocomm) is running the campaign, minister of state for IT and communications Shakeel Ahmad told the House that “the claims made by the private operator are not correct”.

A Reliance Communications official, however, backed the content of the campaign. It’s the youngest because it started acquiring licences only in 2001, he said. It’s the largest, going by its global subscriber base across segments, not just wireless, the official added. And it’s the fastest because of its growth rate in network coverage and increase in subscriber base, he pointed out.

On how MTNL and BSNL have reacted to the Reliance campaign, the minister said, “MTNL and BSNL have their own status and role as reputed telecom companies in their respective service areas”. He backed it up with data. For instance, BSNL has 23.31% of the total all-India market share, with over 20 million connections in mobile services. And, in landline services, BSNL has a 84.25% market share with around 35 million connections and is the largest telecom operator in the country. Among wireless companies, Bharti has the largest subscriber base with over 28 million, followed by Reliance Communications with 24 million CDMA users and more than 2 million GSM subscribers.

On the falling market share of BSNL and MTNL, the minister argued that the two telecom PSUs were aggressively marketing their products, expanding their GSM networks, and adding latest technologies like 3G, IPTV and broadband.