MTS to focus on high speed data services

MTS plans to offer internet services to Rajasthan schools
24 Nov 2009, 1611 hrs IST, Rituraj Tiwari, ET Bureau

JAIPUR: MTS, the mobile telephony services brand of Sistema Shyam Teleservices Ltd (SSTL), is planning to forge a tie up with Rajasthan
government to provide Internet services
to educational institutes in rural areas.

MTS Rajasthan chief operating officer Sandeep Yadav, on the sidelines of a press conference to announce the launch of mobile-high speed data services, Mblaze in Rajasthan, told ET that the mobile operator has sent a proposal to the state government for offering its Internet services to government schools.

“Our infrastructure is in place to cover villages spread across 65 per cent of the state. We are willing to offer our services at confessional rates so that browsing facilities reaches to rural students as well,” he said adding that the company can also offer free hardware if the state government enters into long term association.

MTS is betting big on data services. The company aims at garnering 35 per cent of its total revenue from data services in next two years. “Our major focus would be data services. We expect to corner 35 per cent share of data services in the state and clock a double-digit market share at national level in next two years. We would be launching our services in all the major cities of the state and covering national highways by the end of this fiscal. The post paid services will be launched after some time,” Mr Yadav said.

With this launch, MTS would be offering its data services in Jaipur, Jodhpur, Bhiwadi and Delhi in North India as well as southern cities like Chennai, Coimbatore, Tiruchy, Kochi, Calicut, Trivandrum, Mysore, Mangalore, Bengaluru and Belgaum.

The service offers free Internet browsing to certain websites like Yahoo, Wikipedia and makemytrip, cricinfo, indiatimes and mtsindia allowing subscribers to stay abreast with the latest in news, sports and fashion.

Subscribers will be able to shop and also browse certain educational sites for free. “MTS customers will now be able to use this pre-paid service with rates as low as 10p/MB and there will be no roaming surcharges while using the MTS network.

MTS will have a large seamless high-speed mobile data services network in Rajasthan offering speeds of up to 3.1 Mbps on Rev A,” he said.

Tata Teleservices and Reliance are other two CDMA players offering data services in the state with around 25000 wireless data customers.