BSNL and MTNL, which lost market share to rivals such as Bharti Airtel, Vodafone, Idea Cellular, etc – announced their agreement to share telecom infrastructure and provide joint services to enterprises in India.

The agreement is expected to assist the companies to improve enterprise revenue. BSNL expects to increase its revenue from enterprise segment by 15 to 20 percent following this agreement. MTNL expects to generate additional Rs 100 crore revenues from enterprise business.

Recently, Reliance Communications, Tata Teleservices, Vodafone India, etc. have started focusing more on enterprise business.

The ailing state-run telecom operators, which were earlier evaluated merger options to curb sliding market share and revenue, said they will share assets like buildings and international long-distance phone networks.

They will share their IT and other infrastructure required to jointly serve enterprise customers. The infrastructure to be shared includes buildings, ducts, mobile towers, International long distance and other facilities required for serving corporate clients.

BSNL and MTNL are also working jointly to offer free roaming service to all their customers.

“In the NCR (National Capital Region), leaving Delhi, where BSNL customers is on roaming, he is not charged for roaming. We would like to enlarge that area individually on pan-India basis so that mobile customer does not pay any fees for roaming,” said BSNL Chairman and Managing Director R K Upadhyay.

Both are working on mechanisms to reduce charges levied on customers when they are on roaming and to gradually waive it.

At present MTNL and BSNL do not impose roaming charges for mobile internet services on each others customers.

MTNL CMD AK Garg said that both companies will work to have similar arrangement for phone calls as well.

“We have made certain packages in pre-paid where it (roaming) is allowed on payment of small amount but yes once this synergy are there we will work out to have similar situation for voice also,” Garg said.

“Most of the enterprise customers are headquartered in Delhi and Mumbai. We expect to garner more than Rs 2,000 crore (this fiscal) from enterprise segment after this agreement with MTNL,” Upadhyay said.

BSNL estimates its revenue through this channel at around Rs 1,700 crore in the last fiscal.

The agreement between the two does not include joint tendering process and may continue to rope in separate vendors for sourcing solutions.

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