By IANS
Mumbai : Reliance Communications (RCOM), one of India's leading private mobile service operators, has signed a strategic deal with global CDMA provider Qualcomm Inc. to expand the technology in India.
RCOM announced expanding its CDMA network to more than 20,000 towns in India as it plans to address the needs of rural, urban and enterprise consumers through the introduction of more affordable and feature-rich handsets, wireless Internet data cards and a host of exciting data applications.
"We are committed to the continued explosive growth of telecommunication services in India and with Qualcomm our leadership in the domestic market will strengthen even further," RCOM chairman Anil Ambani said in a statement Saturday.
To meet the requirements of the enterprise segment, RCOM has launched Reliance Netconnect, providing wireless Internet connectivity in more than 8,000 towns, 300,000 villages as also along major highways and railway routes in India.
"Reliance is a key driver of the fastest growing telecom market in the world, and we are pleased to enhance our long standing collaboration with them," said Paul E. Jacobs, chief of Qualcomm.
"Having jointly achieved several milestones in driving down the costs of voice telephony in India, our latest goal is to bring consumers an exciting new range of data offerings in mobile broadband, including multimedia and entertainment," Jacobs added.
India has 205.86 million telecom customers as of March 2007 with the tele-density increasing by 18.23 percent from December 2006, according to the latest report of the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI).