RCOM targets rural customers with new services & sachet pricing for mobile Internet access

• Launch of BharatNet High-speed Wireless Internet service plan
• Expanding rural services with new Grameen VAS
• High impact Machine-to-Machine applications to be a thrust area

Mumbai, August 25th, 2009: Reliance Communications, India's largest dual network operator and one of India's biggest telecom player has introduced major strategic initiatives aimed at growing the mobile telecom and internet penetration in Rural India. This is in line with the company's objective of bridging the Digital Divide.

Over the last six years, since the inception of Reliance Communications, the company has achieved significant success in making mobile telephony affordable to millions of Indians in India. This was one of the key drivers of India's enhanced rural tele-density from 1.5% in March 2003 to 14.80% in March 2009.

RCOM's rural enabler blue-print is based on a three-pronged strategy. Drive internet penetration across rural and sub-urban terrain, thrust on high impact machine-to-machine solutions, and provide value-added services specific to rural needs under GrameenVAS initiative across 500,000 villages.

Commenting on its rural initiatives, Mr S P Shukla, President - Wireless, Reliance Communications said, "The Indian telecom wireless rural subscriber base is now over 125 million. The next wave of telecom growth is emerging from rural India. With rural base expected to double in the next few years, RCOM is committed to drive this exponential growth through innovative and ground breaking service offerings and tariffs."

According to Mr Mahesh Prasad, President - MDCS, Reliance Communications said, "Mobile is rapidly overcoming the challenge of universal access in rural areas. Our goal is to offer to this large rural population across India, innovative products and services customized for rural & local needs. Rural markets offer significant as well as large-scale opportunity to tap highly potential but relatively unaddressed market topography."

With this rural drive, RCOM is launching three initiatives i.e. BharatNet plan, Grameen VAS & M2M (Machine to Machine) solutions.

BharatNet Plan

RCOM's strategy to drive rural internet penetration. Today, there is an existing addressable market base of around 4 million PC users in rural India. However these users are faced with an inherent limitation of dial-up services on quality, speed and an effective broadband service, which are currently available only to urban territories. To address this clear need, RCOM is launching BharatNet plan, the high-speed wireless internet service in over 20,000 rural locations across the country.

This will be a high-speed variant of its Reliance NetConnect service, but specifically designed for the rural and sub-urban markets offering speeds of approximately 153 Kbps, which is 4 to 8 times the current dial-up speed of the wire-line services. Additionally, speed quality will improve since it is no longer dependent on the quality of the copper wire.

As part of this, RCOM is offering BharatNet internet access for just Rs 98/week with downloads upto 350MB. With this sachet pricing, RCOM plans to create appeal with both, casual and heavy users. This tariff will be available across rural India excluding the metros and top 100 cities. "Driving Internet penetration across the country beyond major cities is a key priority for Reliance Communications," said Mr. Prasad.

Grameen VAS

RCOM's Grameen VAS services cater to the specific local needs of rural mobile consumers in over 500,000 Indian villages. This roll-out signifies the company's increased thrust into the vast potential but yet untapped Rural VAS services. The underlying belief is that the mobile phone today is not just a tool for communication, but a device to impart education, facilitate commerce and transactions, offer health and travel solutions and a critical driver for community building.

Grameen VAS will be an integral part of their day-to-day lives. Grameen VAS would cover several specialised services including Mandi Bhav, Agriculture & Animal Husbandry Updates, Weather Forecast, Local Info, Samachar etc. all in multiple Indian Languages. These solutions can be categorised broadly under mLearning, mHealth, mCommerce, mUpdates and GroupSampark (Community Messaging). These services can be accessed via different modes i.e. Voice Portals, SMS, USSD, Data (R-World) etc.

To increase adoption, Grameen VAS is priced at Rs.15/month.

Machine to Machine Applications (M2M)

RCOM's third thrust area will be high impact machine-to-machine applications. These are mobile applications that aid automation, surveillance, remote monitoring, and data gathering. The company is one of the largest users of IMs (Intelligent Modems) and has successfully used them in energy solutions in urban and semi-urban areas. RCOM sees a major potential of machine-to-machine solutions in both rural and urban markets in India.

The M2M opportunity for rural market includes Automation of Agro & Irrigation services, water level monitoring, and data gathering for milk & agri-cooperatives, fisheries, poultry, and soil analysis.

Similar such opportunities for the urban include mobile ticketing, purchase@Kiosks and vending machines, and remote monitoring of office automation products.

About Reliance Communications

Reliance Communications Limited founded by the late Shri Dhirubhai H Ambani (1932-2002) is the flagship company of the Reliance Group. The Reliance Group currently has a net worth in excess of Rs. 64,000 crore (US$ 13.6 billion), cash flows of Rs. 13,000 crore (US$ 2.8 billion), net profit of Rs. 8,400 crore (US$ 1.8 billion).

Reliance Communications is India's foremost and truly integrated telecommunications service provider. The Company, with a customer base of over 85 million including over 2.2 million individual overseas retail customers, ranks among the Top 5 Telecom companies in the world by number of customers in a single country. Reliance Communications corporate clientele includes 2,100 Indian and multinational corporations, and over 800 global, regional and domestic carriers.

Reliance Communications has established a pan-India, next generation, integrated (wireless and wireline), convergent (voice, data and video) digital network that is capable of supporting best-of-class services spanning the entire communications value chain, covering over 20,000 towns and 500,000 villages. Reliance Communications owns and operates the world's largest next generation IP enabled connectivity infrastructure, comprising over 175,000 kilometers of fibre optic cable systems in India, USA, Europe, Middle East and the Asia Pacific region.

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