Indian carrier Tata Teleservices and Japanese telecom giant NTT DoCoMo today announced their plan to launch a Pan-India GSM network in the country. NTT DoCoMo holds a 26 percent stake in Tata Teleservices Limited. Tata Teleservices already operates a CDMA network in India.

Branded as Tata DoCoMo, the network rollout will commence from South India later this month and aims to have Pan-India presence by the end of the year. The carrier claims to offer new, ‘targetted’ value added services, an area dominated by NTT DoCoMo that offers cutting edge services in Japan.
 
We had a chance to sit down and interact with Toshinari Kuneida, the senior vice president and managing director, global business division for NTT DoCoMo. Some edited excerpts from the interaction:

The metropolitan cities in India resemble that of Japan with almost 100 percent penetration and high usage of value added services like video downloads, e-mails and other data intensive services. We will offer innovative services (like i-mode) in this market. However, the rural market is voice centric and we can’t expect high ARPUs (Average Revenue Per User), which is in the range of USD2-3. Over here, there are many first time users who do not have a handset. We will offer handsets in the range of USD 20-30 to these consumers.

We do not have experience in CDMA networks but we can contribute a lot to GSM and WCDMA networks.

While 3G is not available in India, yet, but we can offer a lot of value added services on the current 2.5G networks. We are looking at i-mode, Java apps and e-mail.

Our domestic market (Japan) is already saturated and the ARPUs are going down due to intense competition. Currently we get approximately two percent of our revenues from markets abroad (NTT DoCoMo is present in  about nine markets). We are looking at emerging markets in the APAC region where we are not currently present. It is true that ARPUs going down is a global trend (but we can offset that with more subscribers).

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