Indian Call

April 07, 2008 (LBO) – India's Reliance group is getting into Sri Lanka's telecom sector by forming a joint venture up with the island's Electroteks group, a media report said. Reliance Communications (RCom) would take up a 74 percent stake in the proposed joint venture unit - Reliance Mobile Lanka - in which Electroteks owns the balance equity, India's Economic Times newspaper said, citing an un-named source.

The report said Reliance wanted to set up a 'next generation network' in Sri Lanka.

"The Sri Lankan foray is a part of RCom’s strategy to expand its global optic network, enhance service offerings and start fully integrated telecom operations..," the Economic Times said.

RCom wanted to have a 'One Nation One Account' service in the island.

"Under this plan, the customer is enabled to access all service categories, subject to hardware compatibility," the report said.

"It means, a customer using any service such as mobile phone, landline, Net, Wi-Max, DTH can log on to central server and access any service using his account."

Sri Lanka does not have a 'universal' licensing process yet with each telecom service needing a separate licence