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Reliance plans landline infrastructure by year-end

India's Reliance group, the country's largest business conglomerate, expects to complete by December the initial phase of building infrastructure to provide landline telephone services, a top company official said on Tuesday.

The Bombay-based group is in the midst of building a 60,000 km fibre-optic network, criss-crossing 115 Indian cities and towns in an ambitious drive to become a fully-integrated firm spanning telephony, Internet and entertainment.

"As far as our long distance first-phase plan is concerned, it (laying of infrastructure) will be over by December," B D Khurana, vice-chairman of Reliance Telecom said on the sidelines of a technology conference.

The Reliance group is led by flagship petrochemical company Reliance Industries Ltd and has a clutch of firms controlled by the Ambani family spanning other industries.

The Reliance group has won licences to operate fixed-line telephone services in 16 telecom zones across India.

India opened up its state-controlled telecom business under a decades-old reform programme with a new policy in 1994. But its implementation has been slow to roll out due to political and regulatory hurdles.

India has approved 76 applications from private firms including the Reliance group, the privately-held Bharti group and a joint venture of the Aditya Birla group and US major AT&T to start fixed-line telephone services across the country.

All of these players are eyeing rapid growth in a market which has just over three phones for every 100 people in a nation of one billion people.

Reliance Infocom Ltd, a separate firm which Khurana heads as group president, plans to spend Rs 250 billion to build the nationwide optic-fibre network.

"We are looking at being in the whole portfolio of services of telecom. We are trying to develop applications to use the bandwidth. The services would be in voice, data and video," Khurana said.

Reliance Telecom provides cellular services in many states and local phone services in Gujarat.

Landline telephony has so far been the preserve of state-run Mahanagar Telephone Nigam Ltd which operates in Bombay and Delhi, and Bharat Sanchar Nigam Ltd which serves the rest of the country.

Technology research firm Gartner expects India's fixed-line subscriber base to jump to 83 million by 2005 from about 30 million now.

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