Aditya Birla Group’s GSM mobile service provider company Idea Cellular Limited has announced that it has received licenses to set up its operations in states of West Bengal and Jammu and Kashmir thus covering whole of the country.
With its operations that began in 1997 with two circles, today the company has 17 circles and plans to go pan India by the end of this calendar year. It also announced its plans to concentrate on driving penetration in rural areas in the Maharashtra and Goa circle.
“We plan to achieve this through our various initiatives like vans that will go to rural areas for promotions, there will be mobile handsets at subsidised rates on offer and the like to achieve our goal,”P Laxminarayana, chief operating officer, Maharashtra and Goa, Idea Cellular, told Business Standard .
To take a step in that direction, Idea recently introduced new tariff plans and value added services designed for rural consumers like tips on farming and agriculture. It also apparently added over 1,300 cell sites in 12 months to achieve network coverage of 6,110 cell sites increasing its penetration to 78% from 65% in the previous year in Maharashtra and Goa.
The company aims to have over 1,00,000 outlets in the state, by March 2010.