Tata Tele on an eastern trail
The New Indian Express — June 18, 2005

On a buoyant note after garnering two lakh subscribers in the East. Tata Teleservices plans to expand its presence in the region in a major way. The company's chief operating officer - East. Rajesh Puri told newspersons here on Friday the company achieved the two-lakh subscriber mark despite launching operations in the region only live months ago. According to him, from just three towns at launch in January, it has expanded to 51 towns today, adding one new location almost every three days.

The Kolkata circle alone accounts for one lakh subscribers, with the rest split equally between Orissa, West Bengal and Bihar-Jharkhand circles. Nationally, Tata Teleservices crossed the four-million-subscriber base recently, offering its services in 1,400 towns in 20 telecom circles. Together with group concern VSNL, it now aims to gamer 10 million subscribers by this fiscal-end. It will also work towards an all-India footprint by offering services in Assam and Jammu & Kashmir this fiscal and the North-East sometime next fiscal.

The company has invested around Rs 20,000 crore for telephony so far, including the acquisition of VSNL and plans to spend upto Rs 15,000 crore more for expansion in the next few years, stated Puri. Asked if the spend would include another acquisition, he refused to commit, but said "consolidation is the name of the game." As part of this expansion plan, the company has earmarked a spend of Rs 600 crore for the eastern region this fiscal. Among other things, it plans to offer services in 350 towns as against 60 at present and expand the customer base to 10 lakh. It will also lay 2,000 route km of fibre along the highways and raise the number of public telephone booths from the current 4,500 to over 90,000 by the fiscal-end, Puri announced.