The Hindu Business Line : BSNL nets over 1 lakh bookings for broadband service

BHARAT Sanchar Nigam Ltd has received over one lakh bookings for its broadband services in the first two weeks since its launch. The state-owned company has given 1,000 connections and has rolled out the DataOne service in six cities.

"The response has been tremendous and we expect to pick up the growth numbers in the coming months as we roll out into other cities," said a BSNL official.

The company had launched broadband services on January 14 from Chennai and is offering speeds of 256 Kbps at Rs 500 per month. BSNL proposes to reach 15 cities this month and approximately 200 cities by the end of this fiscal. The company has kept a target of reaching 1 million subscribers over the next couple of years.

BSNL's broadband network is centrally-managed from Network Operating Centres (NOC) located at two sites, one of them being the master at Bangalore and the other disaster recovery site at Pune.

The technology called ADSL (Asymmetric Digital Subscriber Line) will allow the subscriber to surf the net and have a phone conversation simultaneously.

Broadband is slated to be the next big thing after the mobile boom. Companies such as Bharti and Reliance are also moving into the broadband space with applications in various fields such as tele-medicine, tele-education, scientific research and tele agriculture.

BSNL offers separate tariff packages for home and business. The home users can avail band width of minimum download speed of 256 Kbps at Rs 500 per month without security deposit while business users have to shell out Rs 120 monthly with 2 months rental as security deposit.

The DataOne broad band service for the home segment has four monthly tariff plans of Rs 500, Rs 1,000, Rs 1,800 and Rs 3,300 while the corporate users have plans starting from Rs 1,200, Rs 3,000, Rs 5,000 to Rs 9,000 depending on the data speed, data download-upload limit and additional usage charges.

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