At a press conference today, new telecom operator MTS (Shyam Sistema/SSTL) announced that it has crossed 5 million mobile subscribers, 100,000 of them on mobile broadband. To mark hitting the milestone, it has announced the launch of 'Unlimited MBlazer', a broadband product which offers subscribers unlimited data access for 30 days at Rs. 999. Responding to a question from MediaNama about impending competition from winners of 3G (details) and Broadband Wireless Access spectrum (details), Vsevolod Rozanov, President and CEO of SSTL said that their mobile broadband subscriber base is increasing 30-40% month on month, and providing them with an ARPU of around Rs. 500 per connection; the company said that a large number of its mobile broadband subscribers are coming from corporates who are placing multiple orders with the company. "The market is already competitive," Rozanov said, "there are three other players offering products in the same category. We don't expect more than 1-2 more competitors on the CDMA side, so it is unlikely that competition will increase much further. We have a strong data brand, and the market has a very small number of Internet connections, and we see the addition of new players as a positive thing since this will further expand the market. Very few people value speed, and 30% of our sales are still 1x dongles." Atul Joshi, Chief Sales Officer of SSTL added that speeds as high as 3.1 mbps require ideal network conditions, and they have fairly stable speeds across their network. MTS has licenses…
