Bangalore: Reliance Communications Limited, India’s fully integrated telecommunications service provider, signed a eight-year full-scope managed services agreement with Ericsson for USD 1 billion to operate and manage the wireline and wireless networks for Northern and Western states of India.

As per the contract, Ericsson will manage the day to day operations across wireline and wireless networks and will take over responsibility for field maintenance, network operations and operational planning of Reliance Communications 2G, CDMA and 3G mobile networks. This agreement is aimed to meet the fast evolving customer demand for communications applications and services in one of the world’s most dynamic telecom markets.

Reliance Communications will benefit from Ericsson’s proven world-class processes, methods and tools and the partnership will allow Reliance Communications to free up resources to focus on user experience, as well as improving innovation power, agility and speed across the specified geographies. Reliance Communications’ infrastructure covers 24,000 towns and 600,000 villages in India to which it offers converged services including voice, data and video.

This is one of the first converged wireless and wireline managed services contract in India, and one of only a handful in the world. Ericsson will streamline Reliance Communication’s operations by bringing all aspects of Fiber, Tower Operations, Wireless Networks and Wireline Access networks to RCOM’s wireless and Global Enterprise Business, across differentiated product lines. Ericsson will also drive a modernization of the tools, processes and best practices that are applied across the business resulting in operational efficiencies by managing cost through consolidation.

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