Shyam Telelink Awarded Nationwide Spectrum for CDMA Roll-Out in ...

Tag : CDMA

Shyam Telelink, one of the nine new telecoms licensees in India,has been awarded spectrum for offering CDMA service in fourtelecoms circles, including New Delhi and Mumbai, the Economic Times reports. With the CDMA spectrum it already holds for 19 circlesout of India's 23 circles, the company will be able to roll out itsnationwide CDMA service. Shyam Telelink has earlier selected ZTE,Alcatel-Lucent, and Huawei Technologies to supply equipment for theconstruction of a CDMA 800 MHz mobile network. Sistema has said itplans to invest US$4-7 billion to roll out a pan-Indian network.
Outlook and Implications CDMA Strategy in India : Shyam Telelink is one of the nine companies which were awardedunified access service (UAS) licences in India early this year.Other new licensees, such as Datacom, Unitech, Loop Telecom andSwan, plan to roll out their services on the GSM platform, but haveonly been given start-up spectrum largely restricted to thesouthern circles in the country because of the lack of GSMspectrum. Although the Indian mobile market is currently dominatedby the GSM standard and even the existing CDMA majors RelianceCommunications and Tata Teleservices are expanding their GSMservices across the country, Shyam Telelink is clearly keen toreduce its time to market in order to capture the organic growthopportunities. Should the company plan to upgrade its CDMA serviceto 3G, it will have the opportunity to bid for a licence forCDMA-based 3G service. First Major Venture for Sistem outside CIS: Sistema last year acquired a 10% stake in Shyam Telelink and hasincreased the stake to 74%. The Russian conglomerate already ownsleading Russian mobile operator Mobile TeleSystems (MTS), Moscowfixed-line incumbent MGTS, and leading Russian broadband operatorComstar. It is also known to be eyeing an increased stake inRussia's national fixed-line holding Svyazinvest, as well asUkrainian fixed incumbent Ukrtelecom, both of which are subject ofprivatisation rumours. Although the Indian venture represents arare foray for the Russian giant beyond its domestic Commonwealthof Independent States (CIS) markets, its interest in India fits atrend of European companies looking to the emerging markets of Asiafor fresh growth opportunities.