In its ongoing effort to offer countrywide third generation (3G) telecom service, the state owned Bharat Sanchar Nigam Limited (BSNL) on Sunday launched this advanced technology in Chennai, Tamil Nadu in the presence of state chief minister M Karunanidhi.
Another government owned telecom firm, Mahanagar Telephone Nigam Limited (MTNL), had already launched 3G mobile services in Delhi last December.
Prior to granting the 3G licence to private players, both state owned companies have begun their services in view of gaining profits of this innovative service, which impact can be seen in few months.
The 3G-technology allows the users to access better quality and faster accessing services like high-speed internet, video conferencing on mobiles, interactive gaming, ultra fast downloads of video and music clips, mobile TV, movie on demand and many more high-end services.
Unlike Wi-Fi or WLAN network, 3G networks provide wide-area cellular telephone networks; much faster (up to 2 mega bits per second (mbps) data transfer speed) than EDGE or GPRS services that provides only 144 kilo bits per second (kbps) at present.
Inaugurating 3G services in Tamil Nadu, Chief Minister Karunanidhi also made a video call to Union Telecom Minister A Raja.
The company on this occasion said that it would invest Rs.2,700-crore to offer this service in 700 cities, including important towns and district headquarters on PAN India basis.
Before clearing the 3G Spectrum guidelines for the private players, the telecom ministry has allowed to allocate a block of 2*5 GigaHertz (GHz) bandwidth to PSU firms to provide their service across the circles without asking them to participate in the ongoing auction to be held before March 31, 2009 at a equal to the winning bids in the respective circles.
The auction of 3G-spectrum allocation is still pending and according to official sources, it may take at least another six more months before allowing the private players to begin their 3G telecom service after clearing the way to participate in the 3G-spectrum auction process.
Another vital Mobile Number Portability (MNP) system – the system that would allow the unsatisfied mobile subscribers to change their operators without changing their numbers – is still pending and expected to come into operation by the end of third quarter of this year, sources said.
New Tariff Plan
The public sector company has also announced a new tariff plan in post paid service entitled ‘India Golden Fifty’ plan in which subscribers can enjoy the local and national call at any network in just 50 paise per minute while calling on BSNL network, the call charges would be 20 to 30 paisa per minute on local and STD.
Local SMSs charges would also be Rs.0.50, announced BSNL chairman and Managing Director, Kuldeep Goyal, releasing the details of the ‘India Golden 50’ plan. The rental for this plan would be only Rs.375 excluding taxes with the free talk value of Rs.50, he added.
The new tariff would be available by March 01, while commercial 3G services would be available from April 10 this year, sources said.
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