The Hindu : Tamil Nadu / Coimbatore News : Tie-up for phone service in rural market

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Saturday, May 17, 2008
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Tamil Nadu

Tamil Nadu - Coimbatore

Tie-up for phone service in rural market

Staff Reporter

For ‘affordability and accessibility’

Coimbatore: Airtel cellular service provider in its effort to tap the semi urban and rural market is planning to make effective use of its strategic tie-up with the Indian Farmers and Fertilisers Co-operative (IFFCO), Anirban Ghosh, Chief Operating Officer (Tamil Nadu), said on Wednesday.

Talking to reporters, Mr.Ghosh said that Airtel was making consistent efforts in the last two years for an aggressive network expansion with an objective to penetrate into the semi urban and rural pockets.

With the IFFCO tie-up Airtel was confident of using the 4,000-odd co-operative societies in reaching out its products to the rural market with ease, Mr.Ghosh said.

This was expected to increase the net addition to the subscriber base besides enabling Airtel to step up its effort to discharge social responsibility in serving the rural population.

In the last two years i.e., comparing the fiscal 2006-07 and 2007-08, Airtel had covered 85 to 86 per cent of the rural population by reaching out its network and in some of the districts coverage in rural areas had crossed even 90 plus percentage.

Objective

The objective behind the drive was to ensure affordability and accessibility to prospective cellular phone subscribers in rural markets.

In the region, little less than 2000 base transmission stations i.e., cellular towers have ensured coverage for more than 2000 villages, he said.

The recent slash in local/STD and roaming call charges had helped substantially in showing a healthy growth in the number of STD minutes usage.

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