Bharti to invest Rs 2,000 crore

Chennai: Domestic telecom group Bharti Televentures will be investing around Rs 2,000 crore in its mobile, landline and access networks.

"Sixty-five per cent of the additional investment will go into cellular operations and the balance into basic telephony. The investment will be in all the circles where we are present," says Bharti Televentures chairman and managing director Sunil B Mittal. "Bharti Televentures might go for an equity issue in the US sometime next year."

About the proposed unified telecom licence regime (a single licence for all telecom services), Mittal says: "Our position is clear. The government should look into all aspects — the promises made to the existing players — and ensure that nobody is worse off under the proposed set up. We will not undergo any major recast if the unified licence regime comes into play."

The group''s mobile and basic telephony outfits are already separate. "Abroad, companies have bifurcated their cellular and basic telephony services, as the dynamics of each business is different,'' he says. "Bharti will not get into the code-division multiple access (CDMA) technology space."

Predicting a shakeout in the domestic telecom field soon, Mittal is of the view that the field can have only four players in the long run. "Already the cellular market is polarised; 84 per cent of the new subscribers have opted for one of the three service providers — Bharti/Airtel, Bharat Sanchar Nigam or Hutch — in the recent times.

Earlier he inaugurated group company Bharti Telesonic''s Network Operations Centre (NOC) in Chennai. The NOC will centrally monitor, manage and control the 23,000-km fibre-optic national long-distance network spread across India. The company set up its first NOC in North India, in Delhi in 2002.