Uninor takes a different road to sell

MUMBAI, INDIA: Uninor, the joint venture of Norway-based Telenor Group and India’s Unitech Limited holds a pan-India UAS license to offer mobile services across 22 telecom circles.

The company launched services in five more circles on Tuesday, making its services available in 13 circles.

Unior is planning to offer mobile services in the remaining circles by the end of this year. This new telco has already rolled out services in 13 circles in a few months since it launched services in December 2009.

Taking a different path from its competitors, Unior, hasn’t followed any kind of legacy IT systems for operations in India.

“We use the latest IT systems, technologies and networks; and don’t follow any legacy systems. Ours is a faster-low cost business model based on outsourcing principle,” Stein-Erik Vellan, Uninor managing director said.

The telco has a huge network of over 20,000 towers spread across the country; however, these towers are fully outsourced (on-rent) from networks and tower providers, while Wipro provides and maintains its overall IT systems and technologies.

“We have fully outsourced IT to Wipro, which is our IT partner and has over 1000 people taking care of our IT systems. While, for our back offices and call centers we have 3-4 BPO partners, some of which are based in north and south,” Rohit Chandra, Uninor COO told CyberMedia News in Mumbai on Tuesday.

Ageis, Genpact and Sparsh are some of the BPO partners of Uninor, which handles the call center operations.

According to Olav Sande, Uninor executive vice president - Mumbai Hub, Uninor has the state-of-the-art CRM technology by Oracle, which has been integrated with sales and distribution systems. Also, there’s a unique system of tracking the SIM sales using handheld devices, he added.

While in India, top telcos are bracing 3G spectrum, Unior continues to use the 2G EDGE technology platforms for its mobile services. Here Sande pointed out that the 2G EDGE technology is quite powerful in delivering voice clarity as well as data with Internet access.

“All data services are possible over the 2G EDGE technology. And also we are using the AMR technology that allows to build capacity up to 50 per cent within the existing networks and doesn’t require to add more networks and IT infrastructure to high traffics,” Chandra added.

AMR (Adaptive Multi Rate) Wideband is a standardized speech technology to enhance voice quality and clarity in mobile networks to noticeably higher levels than today's mobile and fixed telephony networks, even in whispered conversations or environments with high background noise.

With pure focus on pre-paid mobile connections, Uninor is exploring the market and wooing customers with its ‘24x7 Badalta Discount Plan’ or dynamic pricing plan that offers call discounts from minimum 5 per cent up to 60 per cent. However, this innovative concept has been backed by an intelligent ‘Discount Engine’ that hinges purely on IT systems and billing applications.