Vodafone India on Tuesday unveiled its plans to offer fixed line telephony services in the country.
The wireline services will be aimed at corporate customers that require high bandwidth connectivity, which may not be possible using wireless technologies. The company will roll out the wireline services under its enterprise services arm - Vodafone Business Services.
The move brings Vodafone at par with other large integrated telecom players such as Bharti Airtel, Reliance Communications and Bharat Sanchar Nigam Ltd.
Vodafone’s wireline infrastructure comprises 1.2 lakh km of fibre backbone, over 350 point of presence across 130 cities and a Network Operations Centre for performance management. But in addition to the Indian players, there are a large number of multinational giants, including AT&T, Verizon and Cable & Wireless that are also targeting enterprise customers.
Eyes Govt deals
Vodafone is betting on bagging government projects and has created a new vertical, which will continue to be headed by Naveen Chopra, Director, VBS.
Industry watchers feel that continued uncertainty over spectrum unavailability coupled with huge bandwidth requirements within a corporate has prompted Vodafone to look towards wireline rather than wireless.
“Competitors have bigger footprint than Vodafone - whether globally connected undersea cables or strong existing customer base,” said a telecom analyst from a multinational firm.
Revenue target
However, Vodafone is confident of growth. Vodafone Business is targeting 20 per cent of its enterprise service revenues from wireline services by 2015 and will be offering to manage services such as corporate emails, video conferencing, security and other large bandwidth hogging operations.
Since Vodafone acquired Cable and Wireless for $1.7 billion last year, it also gets access to an existing customer base, according to industry watchers.
“We have been doing this since the past three years and now we feel that customers are willing to pay for services rather than the (broadband) pipe,” says Chopra.
When asked how much this business contributed to Vodafone’s bottomline, Chopra said that currently it was ‘miniscule’ but added that revenue from enterprise services contribute about 10 per cent of the $69 billion turnover last year.