News: Tatas say no plan yet for GSM mobile service

(RTR 15/06/2006) Mumbai - The Tata group said on Thursday it had no immediate plans to embrace Global System for Mobile Communications, or GSM, for its mobile phone services and would stick with a rival broadband technology.

The group's firms offer services under Code Division Multiple Access standard, touted as a high-speed technology competing with GSM to attract users in India's booming mobile phone market.

"We firmly believe in the CDMA technology and remain committed to growing the business (in India)," Darryl Green, chief executive officer of Tata Teleservices Ltd., the group's dominant mobile services firm, told Reuters.

India had 101.17 million mobile phone users at the end of May, of whom 75.29 million had taken the GSM service and the rest opted for CDMA. The country adds more than four million users each month.

Tata's statement comes days after its main CDMA competitor, Reliance Communication Ventures Ltd., applied to the Indian government for GSM frequency as part of a plan to expand services.

Indian media have speculated that the Tata group might enter the GSM sector, but Green would only say, "we are watching the situation."

CDMA is a proprietary standard designed by Qualcomm Inc. and is the dominant network standard for North America and parts of Asia. GSM is widely used across most of Asia and Europe.

Green also said that Tatas would wait to see what Reliance Communication did with its CDMA network as it expanded in GSM.

Reliance Communication has 19.5 million users, while Tata group firms that operate under the "Tata Indicom" brand together have nearly 10 million users.