In order to cover all districts and blocks of the country, Bharat Sanchar Nigam Ltd (BSNL), the state-owned telecom operator has announced to expand its broadband service to 1.48 lakh villages from the existing 30,000 villages within the time span of only six month. The India’s largest public sector telecom firm has also announced to share its network with private telecom companies on roaming.
BSNL in its latest decision to enhance its reach into remote areas of the country has announced to extend its broadband service initially at district level and later at block level. At present BSNL has already covered 95% of district headquarters and 44 % of blocks. It will also expand its service in 5000 cities from current 3261 cities by March next year.
The Universal Service Obligation Fund would finance the PSU telecom firm for expanding its service in pan India.
This broadband service would help the districts and blocks to adopt e-governess service. The several institutional areas like schools, public health centres, village panchayats and Community Service Centres (CSCs) that come in the range of 10 km of block and district headquarters will be benefited from this connectivity.
In order to elaborate the wireless broadband service, government is promoting the expansion of rural wireline and wireline based broadband services by slashing the licence fee in rural wireline service.
Moreover in a move of extending GSM mobile service in remote areas of the country, BSNL is planning to procure 93 million lines in the phased manner to cover more rustic areas. For this, it has already floated zonal tenders. Some value added service like mobile TV, mobile broadband, MMS, location based services etc will also be introduced to multifold reach and revenue.
BSNL that covers 43% of total rural subscribers has now planned to provide cheapest roaming service to its customers. For this, it is going to sign a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) soon with novice telecom companies on experimental basis. As per sources, it is planning to sign roaming agreement with Swan Telecom, a new telecom operator.
After signing the deal, BSNL will charge operating cost at only Rs.0.52 per minute on out going calls for initial periods of six months only, while the incremental additional cost of upgrading the equipment, Interconnect Usage Charges (IUC), termination charges, license fee, spectrum charges, SMS and value-added service charges will be borne by the private operators.
BSNL, the leader in the fixed landline and Wireless Land Line (WLL) services, had also reduced the tariff charges (fixed monthly charges) on Gramin Telecom plan from Rs. 110 to Rs.75 and on Sulabh plan from Rs. 120 to Rs.99.
The biggest telecom agency is eying to enhance 500 million telephone connections by 2010 and 750 million connections by 2012. For this, it is giving priority to rural and remote areas of the country.
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