New Delhi: Reliance Jio Infocomm will serve the country’s largest and most sought-after accounts in telecom - the railways - from January 1, with officials saying it is likely to slash the national transporter’s phone bills by around 35 per cent at least.
Railways has been using Bharati Airtel for over six years as its telecom provider for 1.95 lakh mobile phone connections used by its employees in closed user group (CUG) across the country for which the railways paid around Rs 100 crore bill per year, they said.
Its validity will expire on December 31 this year.
A Railway Board order issued on November 20 said it had assigned the responsibility to RailTel (railway PSU) for finalisation of fresh CUG scheme for Indian Railways as the validity of the existing scheme is expiring on December 31. Fresh CUG scheme had since been finalised by RailTel and Reliance Jio Infocomm has been awarded the contract to implement the scheme.
“The fresh CUG will come into effect from January 1, 2019,” said the order which detailed the tariff rates to be provided by the company.
Closed User group (CUG) is a supplementary service provided by the mobile operators to subscribers who can make and receive calls from any member associated within the group. This service is applicable for SMS also.
