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N. Ramakrishnan

CHENNAI, April 2

OVER the next few months, Reliance Infocomm Ltd will unveil across Tamil Nadu the Reliance Webworld, where all of its products and services will be available for customers. A couple of Webworld outlets have opened in Chennai initially selling at the moment only the CDMA mobile service.

In the first phase, the company will have 28 Webworld outlets, 12 of them in Chennai and the balance in the other major cities and towns like Madurai, Coimbatore and Tiruchi. A total of 125 Webworld outlets will come up in the State, all of them by June, according to Reliance Infocomm officials.

The Webworld outlets will be the retail interface of Reliance Infocomm providing all telecom services across the counter to customers. They will sell accessories and will also have customer care counters, according to Mr Raja Vaidyanathan, Chief Operating Officer - Tamil Nadu, Reliance Infocomm.

He told Business Line that over time the Webworld outlets will have food and beverage counters - operated by Qwiky's - and then offer a whole host of broadband connectivity services. These outlets will be about 4,000 sq.ft. in the major cities and towns, where all the facilities will be available, and about 500 sq.ft. in the smaller towns that do not require facilities like the food and beverage counters, and the broadband services.

The broadband connectivity services that will be available include surfing the Net, video conferencing, digital movies and digital music. Reliance Infocomm hopes to push in a major way the video conferencing facility highlighting the aspect that it will do away with the need to travel for a meeting.

For instance, a person in Madurai planning to come to Chennai for a meeting, can call up that person in Chennai, ask him to be present in a Reliance Webworld outlet at a particular time and complete the video conference from a Webworld outlet in Madurai itself.

It is a new concept that the company will have to push, admits Mr Vaidyanathan, highlighting the fact that time and money is saved.

The Webworld outlets will be run by franchisees with Reliance Infocomm being in charge of selecting the premises and getting it ready to specifications, and the franchisee bearing a part of this cost. Each Webworld will be a profit centre, Mr Vaidyanathan says.

Reliance Infocomm has also identified about 6,000 buildings in Chennai and the other major towns in the State housing offices, and provided optical fibre connectivity to these buildings in preparation for launching its broadband service for corporates, slated for June-July. Across the country, Reliance has done this for about 1,00,000 buildings in the first phase.

According to Mr Vaidyanathan, the company will be able to offer a minimum of 2 MB of connectivity to the companies that opt for this service and can be used for a variety of applications by the corporates.

He said that Reliance Infocomm had laid about 5,500 km of optical fibre cables across Tamil Nadu and hoped to provide the service to about 110 towns (or 88 short distance charging areas). While the company had signed agreements with almost all the private telecom operators, both basic and cellular, for connecting calls from one network to another, it hoped to sign similar agreements with BSNL in the next few weeks.

At present, Mr Vaidyanathan said, Reliance Infocomm had been able to enrol about one lakh subscribers for its mobile service, a number which could have been much higher if the inter-connect agreements had been signed. With the agreements now in place, the company hoped to increase its subscriber base substantially. Of the 88 SDCAs, Reliance had identified 12 as accounting for almost 75 per cent of the traffic and was focusing to a greater extent in these places, he said.

In 37 towns in the State with DEL population less than 1,000 the company would launch its services through small automatic exchanges run by franchisees. Reliance Infocomm would have 350 towers in Tamil Nadu, 140 of them in Chennai, he said.

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