Reliance Communication (RCOM), India’s third largest telecom operator in an effort to provide better network service to its customers signed an eight-year full-scope managed services agreement with Ericsson for USD 1 billion to operate and manage the wireline and wireless networks in the Northern and Western states of India including Delhi and Mumbai.
This is one of the first converged wireless and wireline managed services contract in India, and one of only a handful in the world. As per the contract, Ericsson will manage the day to day operations across wireline and wireless networks and will take over responsibility for field maintenance, network operations and operational planning of RCOM’s 2G, CDMA and 3G mobile networks. Ericsson will streamline RCOM’s operations by bringing all aspects of fiber, tower operations, wireless networks and wireline access networks to RCOM’s wireless and global enterprise business, across differentiated product lines. This contract will lead to productive integration of 5,000 employees by moving them to Ericsson providing them global opportunities.
Reliance Communications will benefit from Ericsson’s proven world-class processes, methods and tools and the partnership will allow them to free up resources to focus on user experience, as well as improving innovation power, agility and speed across the specified geographies. Reliance Communications’ infrastructure covers 24,000 towns and 600,000 villages in India to which it offers converged services including voice, data and video.
“This partnership will enable our enterprise customers to deploy state-of-the-art data services on our integrated network through the global expertise of Ericsson. This is one of the first times that wireless and wireline enterprise network is being outsourced to deliver world-class service and performance assurance,” commented Punit Garg, Chief Executive Officer, Global and Enterprise Business, Reliance Communications.
Ericsson will be responsible for improving network performance and ultimately service quality, with the goal of increasing customer satisfaction and retention. Ericsson will also work closely with Reliance Communications to identify opportunities to introduce new services and expand its existing businesses to help realize the full potential of its network.