But the usual Reliance methods of scale and speed are very much in attendance. The company has done a national rollout of the new licence in just 12 months.
The others who got licences at the same time are nowhere close to it. RCom has already invested over Rs 10,000 crore and its target is to reach 95 per cent of the population in three to four months.
That is close to the penetration of its CDMA service, which has more than 50 million subscribers. By the end of this month, RCom’s GSM will be in 11,000 cities and 300,000 villages.
The low-key launch has given ammunition to the spectrum theory. Its propounders say the company has saved on marketing and advertising expenses so that it reaches the half a million mark in subscribers in Delhi and Mumbai at the lowest possible cost and get more spectrum.
"There is nothing to respond to as they are not following a sustainable pricing policy and their average revenue per user is negative. They are making a loss per subscriber and virtually giving away SIMs (subscriber identity module cards) free to subscribers.
Their aim is to reach 500,000 subscribers in a circle so that they can get the additional 1.8 MHz of spectrum nearly free of cost. They are not making any advertising blitz to keep the numbers in check,” says a senior executive of a leading telecom company.
Image: Connecting people. | Photograph, courtesy: Reliance Communications
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