The growing newcomer in the mobile telephone market of India – Sistema Shyam TeleServices Ltd (SSTL) has announced that it has achieved one million mark of the subscriber base for its service brand MTS. The joint venture between Sistema of Russia and Shyam Group of India – SSTL has claimed that MTS showed rapid growth in the last three months, spreading out its network from Rajasthan to three more circles – Tamil Nadu, Kerala and Kolkata – representing 13% of the total population of India.

Since its launch on October 1, 2008, the CDMA service MTS has gained its share of subscribers in the range of 11-13% per month, in the total mobile market of Rajasthan. Currently, Rajasthan represents 87% to the subscriber-base of MTS, while the remaining 12.5% subscribers come from Tamil Nadu, Kerala, where the service was launched two months ago. Kolkata is the largest circle to see the launch of MTS service.

Recently, MTS has tied up with Teleservices Ltd (TTSL) to take advantage of the Tata’s CDMA network for roaming services. This is the first time that two private CDMA operators have got into a deal to provide roaming services on each others networks.

Meanwhile, the SSTL, which is now launching its CDMA-based mobile services MTS throughout India, has also announced that it has inked an IT services agreement with the Big Blue, IBM for developing green data centers in India. According to the deal, IBM will design and develop two green data centers for the SSTL in Chennai and Gurgaon.

The deal is the part of the pan-India expansion program of the SSTL. The two green data centers will help the SSTL in saving 20 percent of energy. IBM will deploy cooling solution at the two data centers for benefits of power and cooling automatically, depending on the load, and for substantial operational savings for SSTL. The Big Blue will also set up a Network Operations Center (NOC) to help the SSTL team in monitoring and managing applications and network 24/7 basis. The SSTL will use the Chennai center as the main data centre, while the Gurgaon site will be used as the disaster recovery center.    

The SSTL is hoping that it will be able to pay for all its operating expenses within three years, in spite of facing severe competition from several other players in the market. The company is expecting that it will have ample of capital in hand after clearing its debts by 2013.