Mumbai: Bharti Airtel Limited, India's top mobile phone operator, will invest $150 million in Sri Lanka to roll out operations in that country. The company has signed an agreement with the island nation's foreign investment promotion body towards this end, a company official said.

Airtel had recently got the permission from Sri Lankan Telecom Regulatory Commission to start 2G and 3G services. It bagged the licence competing against Reliance Communications and Maxis Telecom.

Bharti is currently scouting for locations to set up base stations and talking to equipment vendors to rollout its network there.

"If things go as planned, we are hoping to launch our services by the end of this calendar year," Narendra Gupta, a director of Bharti, said.

The Sri Lankan operations would be the first international foray for the Indian company and Bharti hopes to use it as a base to expand into the South Asian region.

"Sri Lanka is a very promising market for telecom services, with lower phone penetration at 20 per cent," Gupta said.

Sri Lanka's telecommunications sector is growing fast with the number of mobile phone subscribers rising to 4.5 million by the end of 2006.

The market is currently dominated by Telekom Malaysia's Dialog Telekom, which has over 3.3 million subscribers on its network, distantly followed by Mobitel, Celltel Lanka and Hutchison. Bharti will be the fifth mobile phone operator in Sri Lanka.