RCOM to Shut Down Mobile Voice Services of Own and MTS, Focus on Enterprise only

India’s CDMA saga is over, as RCom announced the completion of the acquisition of MTS India network. It seems to be the end of an chapter of Indian telecom, as the CDMA network of MTS is to be shut down by 30th of November 2017. The lone CDMA survivor is Tata Docomo CDMA, which has been already acquired by Airtel and 800MHz will be soon vacated for LTE deployment once the deal is completed.

For MTS CDMA customers it will be very much problematic, as the text received by users from RCom, mentions clearly that they can migrate to RCOM’s 4G data network or port out to the carrier of their choice.

Recently RCom and Aircel, who had the plan to merge, opted out from the merger agreement and post that Rs. 4500 crore debt-laden RCom has gone through several drastic decisions – 

• they will not renew license of DTH business (services will be stopped by November 18 and customers will be moved to Tata Sky) operated under RelianceTV (previously BigTV); Reliance TV has the lowest market share among 6 DTH companies in India (others are: Dish TV, Tata Sky, Airtel TV, Videocon d2h and Sun Direct). [Update #1: Tata Sky will offer seamless migration for RelianceTV users, who can swap the prepaid account balance to Tata Sky accounts]

        [Update #2: On November 6th Reliance Communications announced that Reliance Digital TV or simply RelianceTV will be sold to Veecon Media and Television. Veecon will “acquire the entire shareholding of Reliance BIG TV with business on ‘as-is where-is’ basis, along with all existing trade liabilities and contingent liabilities"] 

• planned for shut down of 2G and 3G data and voice (1800/900/2100 Mhz) networks across the country by the end of 2017. 

• RCom is all set to stop all consumer biz, they will stop the Reliance Broadband services for home users also. 

As per the sources and different media reports Anil Ambani led Reliance Communications (RCom) will now focus on 4G oriented business strategy (from present retail focused biz strategy) along with its Global Cloud Exchange and data centre biz. On the 4G front, RCom has rolled out LTE-FDD on the 800-850MHz band so far, and there is no Voice over LTE (VoLTE). RCom currently shares their 850MHz LTE network with Reliance Jio.

Many experts suggest that RCom may turn itself into MVNO piggybacking on Jio's VoLTE enabled LTE networks.

Briefly, if you are an MTS customer, your fancy CDMA network is gone. You have to shift to RCOM GSM/4G network and RCom is all set to shut down its 2G/3G GSM network very soon. So you are left with RCom’s LTE network without the voice, and the no-voice LTE means you are a basically data card user, who can't port out to other operators. Hence all MTS customers will have to port out to other operators like Airtel, BSNL, Vodafone, Idea or Jio.

MTS India's website is already down. Many users found that the customer care services are also down. I must say RCOM again failing while shutting down CDMA of MTS, they are making same mistake - too much hurry when they were shutting down own CDMA networks across the circle. 

I will miss excellent voice and data quality I enjoyed while on MTS CDMA/EVDO on home and roaming!