New Delhi, Feb. 12: Kishore Biyani’s Future Group has entered into a franchisee arrangement with Tata Teleservices to offer GSM mobile services under the T24 brand name.

“This is a franchise model. Under the partnership, Future Group will sell TTSL’s connections under the brand name T24 to customers from its retail outlets,” said Anil Sardana, managing director of Tata Teleservices Limited (TTSL).

TTSL, which is 26 per cent owned by Japan’s NTT DoCoMo, offers GSM services in 15 telecom circles in the country under the DoCoMo brand.

For TTSL, it is the second such franchisee deal as it also has a similar agreement with Virgin Group.

The Virgin Group deal is based on the MVNO (mobile virtual network operator) platform, whereby the operator buys bulk airtime from existing mobile operators and resells it to customers under their own brand.

However, the agreement with Future Group is different. With the tagline of “Shop more, talk more and talk more, shop more” the mobile GSM service will work more like a loyalty programme — a customer will get some talk time bonus when he shops at Future Group stores and a T24 user will get reward points or vouchers for merchandise sold at the group’s stores.

“In the MVNO model, there is commitment of bulk buying of airtime. But in this model we don't have any such commitments,” said Sardana.

The commercial launch of GSM operations under the brand T24 will start over the next few months, with a pan-India rollout to be completed by end of 2010.

“Customers will get shopping benefits for talking and talk-time benefits each time they shop,” said Kishore Biyani, CEO of Future Group.