MUMBAI (Bloomberg) - Billionaire Anil Ambani's Reliance Communications Ltd. will cut its debt by at least $3 billion by selling its mobile-phone transmission towers, people familiar with the deal said.

GTL Infrastructure Ltd. will buy approximately 50,000 towers from Reliance in its second acquisition this year, the Indian companies said today. Combining the Reliance and GTL assets will create India's second-largest transmission network, worth 500 billion rupees ($11 billion), the two said without disclosing details.

Selling the towers will help Reliance, also known as Rcom, invest in network upgrades after it paid 85.9 billion rupees last month to buy permits to offer high-speed wireless phone services. GTL will take on as much as 150 billion rupees of debt in addition to paying stock and cash, the people said. Reliance had debt of 199 billion rupees as of March 31.

"This would add significant cash to the books of Rcom," said Nishna Biyani, an analyst with Prabhudas Lilladher Pvt Ltd. in Mumbai. "I wouldn't be surprised if Rcom stock reaches 200 rupees."

The transaction is expected to be completed during the next six months, Reliance Communications said. Gaurav Wahi, a spokesman for the company, declined to comment on the debt transfer. Standard Chartered Bank acted as financial adviser to GTL Infrastructure. Reliance Communications acted without outside advisers on the transaction.

The deal is good news for India's communications industry because it values the towers of the combined entity at 6.3 million rupees each, 25 percent more than the most recent such sale, Biyani said.

Transactions have valued Indian telecommunications towers at between 4.5 million rupees and 4.8 million rupees, according to a June 16 note from Religare Institutional Research. American Tower Corp.'s Indian subsidiary in February agreed to acquire the Essar Group's tower unit for about $430 million, and in January, GTL agreed to buy 17,500 transmission sites from Aircel Ltd. for 84 billion rupees to help it double its network in India.

"There's going to be a lift in valuations for tower assets across the country," Biyani said.

The deal comes as average revenue per user, a key metric in the telecommunications industry, is poised to fall 22 percent in India this year after declining 25 percent in 2009, according to Bank of America Corp.'s Merrill Lynch unit.

Price competition has cut call rates to less than one US cent a minute, Merrill Lynch said. Only Pakistan and Bangladesh have lower average revenue per customer than India, the world's second-largest mobile phone market, it said.

In addition to 48,139 mobile-phone towers, Reliance Communications owns an optical-fiber cable network of 190,000 kilometers, according to a June 16 report from HDFC Securities. Its customers include Tata Teleservices Ltd., NTT DoCoMo Inc.'s Indian partner, and Uninor, a venture between India's Unitech Ltd. and Norway's Telenor ASA.

Reliance Communications has plans to sell a 26-percent stake in itself at an "appropriate" premium to the market price to a strategic or private equity investor.