Tata Teleservices on Thursday said it would launch prepaid services on its CDMA mobile phones in June this year.

"The prepaid launch will happen in June-July time frame and will coincide with the new capacity build-up," Amit Bose, president (telecom), TTSL, told PTI in New Delhi.

In the next five years, even as per conservative estimates, the market will grow between 100 million and 150 million from 30 million, Bose said, adding that there was enough opportunity to grab the market despite companies like Reliance having already launched the pre-paid services.

Bose said TTSL was looking at the capacity build-up of five million lines in 11 new circles and added that the rollout in these circles will start in September.

Bose claimed TTSL has a subscriber base of 1.6 million in six existing circles including Delhi, Andhra Pradesh and Gujarat.

He said TTSL's long-term focus was to become a wireless broadband service provider.

"Wireless will provide faster and wider coverage and thus the focus is to provide high bandwidth wireless broadband in early 2005," he said.

Announcing the roadmap for broadband services by Tatas, Bose said the company was planning to enhance the speed of the network from 154 Kbps today to up to 25 Mbps in future.

Bose also claimed that their entire billing system was online.

Asked if the company had seen unusual surrendering of phones due to billing problems, Bose said,  "There were never unsual surrenders...our billing system is fully online now."

Of the total Tatas subscriber base, as much as 40 per cent is fixed wireless and the balance 60 per cent is wireless mobile.