Top 10: TTSL — Expanding Mode

TTSL managed to clock revenues of `8,280 crore in FY11 as compared to `6,900 crore in FY10 showing a healthy growth of 20%, riding high on its first mover advantage.

Subscribers in FY11 accounted for a whopping 89 mn as compared to 66 mn in FY10. Revolutionizing the entire Indian telecom industry with its pay per second billing, TTSL marked its presence in the Indian telecom industry.

Tata Teleservices is considered a pioneer of the CDMA 1x technology platform in India. It has embarked on a growth path since the acquisition of Hughes Telecom, renamed Tata Teleservices (Maharashtra) by the Tata Group in 2002. It launched mobile operations in January 2005 under the brand name Tata Indicom, and today enjoys a pan-India presence through existing operations in all of India's 22 telecom circles. The company is also the market leader in the fixed wireless telephony market.

TTSL was the first private operator to launch 3G in India on November 4, 2010. TTSL's GSM arm DOCOMO became the first operator to launch 3G services in the country in 110 cities and presently has around 1.5 mn subscribers.

To get a headstart in the 3G domain, TTSL fast-tracked its rollout of 3G services by roping in 2 vendors-NSN and Huawei. It awarded a contract to NSN to set up its 3G infrastructure for broadband and better quality voice call services. The operator also signed a contract with Huawei to set up networks for 3G mobile telephony services in 5 of its 9 telecom circles.

Tata Indicom, TTSL's CDMA brand, launched its high-speed Tata Photon+ data service over mobile phone in April 2010. This service offers speed as high as those provided by 3G services. In addition, services such as live TV, push mail and VoD were launched as part of this package. TTSL has always come out with new and innovative schemes in its data services, be it Photon TV and Photon-On-Mobile or Tata Walky which currently are considered landmark innovations.

Last year, TTSL launched first of its kind health services, 'Sparsh'-a service on sexual and reproductive health related issues aiming at using mobile phone to build awareness about these issues. TTSL tied up with various handset vendors for strengthening its CDMA and GSM operations. HTC, a global designer of smartphones, and Tata DOCOMO announced the launch of HTC 7 Mozart in India.

Tata Indicom, the CDMA arm of Tata Teleservices and Research in Motion announced the launch of the BlackBerry Bold 9650, the first combined CDMA-GSM 3G-ready smartphone in the BlackBerry Bold series.

TTSL also introduced football and cricket matches on the move, for Tata Indicom and DOCOMO subscribers, respectively. Also during Commonwealth Games, it introduced CWG 2010 value added service portfolio for all its customers across India. Apart from this, it launched 'Insta Conference'-a unique audio conferencing service using XOP Network's Universal Service Node (USN) platform. This service allows a customer to instantly convene a voice conference with a pre-selected group of individuals at the press of a key. It also launched facility of 'Call-n-Tweet' service for all TTSL and TTML subscribers where they can update their Twitter status by posting voice tweets (short audio snippets) from their mobile without logging on the internet.

Today, Tata Teleservices, along with TTML is serving more than 450,000 towns and villages across the country, with a bouquet of telephony services encompassing mobile services, wireless desktop phones, public booth telephony and wireline services. With all these achievements and efforts to achieve more, coupled with steady and fast growth rate, TTSL is poised to reach new heights.