Telecom Roundup: Reliance, TATA Announce International Partnerships, New Licenses, Return Of The Spe

[by Cerius Shah] — Reliance Globalcom, the newly formed consolidated entity we recently covered, has struck a deal with Du, a telco based out of the UAE. The deal will include Reliance providing bandwidth, strengthening the capacity of Du’s networks, and joint offerings of value-added data services. Du had in Feb last year launched mobile telecommunication services across the UAE in addition to internet and pay TV services in some of the free zones of Dubai. The telco, which is 40% owned by the UAE Federal Government, is one of the two telecom monoplies besides Etisalat, with the former presiding over freezones and Etisalat over everything else.

The deal appears to be a direct outcome of the outage Du faced during the undesea cable crisis. Its apparently the only provider to Dubai Internet City, and services were badly effected since it uses Flag as a backbone.

— Tata has announced its agreement with China Enterprise Netcom Corporation Ltd (China Entercom). The deal, covered previously, will see customers from both telco’s benefiting from VPN connectivity across both infrastrucutres.

— The DoT has today issued 22 licenses to three new players, starting with Videocon controlled Datacom, which has been issued a permit for 19 circles. According to this ET report,  a total of 120 licenses would be distributed among nine companies, including Unitech, Spice, Shyam Telelink and others that were issued Letters of Intent on January 10, this year. Spectrum still has to be acquired, which is another ball game.  The IT Minister, A Raja, is aiming at 25 paise per minute for loca mobile calls and 50 paise for long distance and DoT presumes tariffs will fall by 50% with the entry of the new players.

— Further to the above, Mint reports the DoT evaluating a proposal to ask Telco’s to return spectrum based on its revised spectrum allocation norms. According to Mint’s calculations, BPL would be asked to return 3.8MHz and Bharti and Vodafone (NYSE: VOD) between 0.8 – 1.8MHz. Seems highly unlikely without a fight considering recent comments made by spectrum starved Sarin and Mittal.

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