Reliance Communications (RCom) today has informed the BSE that the company has received requisite approvals from the department of telecommunications to offer GSM services on a nation wide basis under its existing Unified Access Service Licenses.
The move makes RCom which runs GSM services in seven circles (the North-East, Assam, Orissa, West Bengal, Madhya Pradesh and Bihar) ready to operate GSM services in rest of the country.
All that the company needs to do now is to pay the required licence fee of Rs 1,617 crore to the DoT and install the relevant equipment.
According to sources, Reliance Communications is ready to pay the fees immediately and is in a position to get the network up and running within four to six weeks time.
The DoT will grant the company an additional 4.4 MHz in the 1,800 MHz band across the country for this purpose.This will be in addition to the existing CDMA network that Reliance runs nationwide.
Once Reliance's GSM network is up and running, it would provide stiff competition to the likes of Bharti Airtel and Vodafone Essar in a bid to gain market share.
This will also impact CDMA vendors like Qualcomm, which receive royalties for the CDMA handsets that operators like Reliance use. With Reliance moving to a competing standard, there is a downside for the US-based company, analysts said.
Reliance had applied to the DoT for GSM spectrum for 15 circles in February 2006.
The DoT had recently cleared the policy, allowing dual usage of technologies (CDMA as well as GSM) to existing licensees
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