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Aircel to spread wings into Mumbai

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CIOL Bureau
New Update

MUMBAI, INDIA: After strengthening its customer base in south and north-east regions, Aircel is entering the Mumbai (metro) telecom circle and plans to launch services in next few months, said a company source.

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“We will be launching our services in Mumbai in the next couple of months. After Mumbai, we will also be launching our operations and services in other circles,” a top company official told CyberMedia News on Friday.

There exists a strong competition among the telecos in Mumbai (metro) telecom circle. In the GSM segment, there are six major players – Vodafone, Airtel, BPL, Idea,MTNL and the latest edition of RCOM, which entered the arena in December 2008.

While in the CDMA segment, there's Tata Indicom, RCOM, MTNL's Garuda and Virgin Mobile. Keeping in view the expanding subscriber base in Mumbai, Aircel is likely to get only a small customer base initially.

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Also the Mobile Value Added Services (MVAS) market is a key driver from which telecos earn a substantial revenues and remains highly lucrative.

About the telecom market and subscriber base in the Mumbai circle, the source opined, “There's room for all, given the size of city's population. Every one needs a mobile phone, right from a company's CEO to a cab driver, every one is dependent on it. Hence, mobile phone is an essential requirement and today one can't do without it.”

Further the source added, “We are the top service providers in Chennai and rest of Tamil Nadu and also we are present in far remote areas in the north east states of Assam, Himachal Pradesh, also Bihar, West Bengal and Jammu & Kashmir. Hence, we are moving step by step from one region to another. We want to offer good services to customers and the quality of services will help to bring customers in Mumbai.”

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Aircel Group is a joint venture of Malayasia based Maxis Communications Berhad and India's Apollo Hospital Enterprise Limited, where Maxis Communication holds 74 per cent stake.

Aircel started operations in Tamil Nadu back in 1999 and slowly moved into nine telecom circles of north east and south.

It has over 15 million customers in total across the circles. Moreover, the company has gained additional spectrum from the Department of Telecommunication (DoT) for 13 new circles including Mumbai (metro), Delhi (metro), Andhra Pradesh, Gujarat, Haryana, Karnataka, Kerala, Madhya Pradesh, Maharashtra and Goa, Rajasthan, Punjab, UP (west) and UP (east).

According to Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI) annual report 2006-07, the wireless services (GSM and CDMA) crossed 165.11 million subscribers mark, which comprise 120.47 million GSM and 44.64 million CDMA subscribers.

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