|
|
Continuing 3G launching spree across the country, BSNL has bought 3G to Hyderabad, the capital of Andhra Pradesh and other major cities across the state. This comes barely days after the service was launched in Bangalore, Karnataka.
While the launch of the services was expected across Andhra Pradesh, what has interested us are the tariffs of the service – details of which are provided below:
Bharat Sanchar Nigam Limited (BSNL) on Saturday launched the country’s first commercial urban mobile WiMax network in Ernakulam. The service was inaugurated by Union Minister of State for Agriculture K V Thomas.
BSNL is the first operator in the country to launch commercial mobile WiMax service, for which technical support is being provided by Aviat Networks. “In the initial phase, 450 base stations will be set up across the state at a cost of Rs 100 crore, which will cover all the major cities and district headquarters.
In yet another setback to its international expansion plans, Bharat Sanchar Nigam (BSNL) has lost the bid for managing telecom networks of the Ethiopian Telecommunications Corp (ETC), a state monopoly in the African nation.
“BSNL had bid aggressively for the contract, but lost to France Telecom,” sources familiar with the development told ET. They said although BSNL had made a financially better offer than France Tele, it did not qualify on some other criteria, including operational performance in the domestic market.
Tourist destinations of India Ooty, Coonoor and the business metropolis Coimbatore will now host 3G mobile services. BSNL has formally announced to provide service in the Tamil Nadu Circle. 3G allows simultaneous use of speech and advanced data services 3G technology offers unprecedented quality in voice call as well as a wide range of compelling data services.
This service supports speeds of up to 3.1Mbps and promises to give seamless online internet experience to users on their mobile handsets and without any difficulty users can experience video calls, Fring or skype can be installed by the users on their mobile phones.
A problem in a mobile service station in Salt Lake caused a signal blackout, which effected 18 lakh BSNL mobile customers. The glitch disconnected these subscribers for more than six hours. Subscribers in Calcutta, barring some with prepaid connections, were not affected, according to The Telecgraph – India.
“There was a power problem in a major service station in Salt Lake as a result of which all connections in the West Bengal circle were disrupted,” said a senior BSNL official.
Goa is set to experience the next revolution in cell phone technology in January, 2010.
Soon, you will be able to transfer both voice data—a telephone call—and nonvoice data, such as downloading information, exchanging e-mails, and instant messaging all simultaneously.
Not to forget video calls, where you will be able to view the person you talk to on your cell phone. BSNL has scheduled a roll-out of its 3G services in Goa within a month’s time.
Even as private telecom operators are slugging it out in the ongoing ‘pricing strategy’ , state-run telecom operator BSNL seems to have pushed the limits of the ‘first mover’ advantage of rolling out 3G services. The company launched an extremely aggressive pricing of 30 paise per minute for local and 50 paise for STD video calls, making it as cheap as the current pricing existing in the market.
BSNL’s 3G service, launched in Chennai on Friday evening, will be available on both pre-paid and post-paid connections. 3G will make available other facilities like mobile live TV and high-speed internet with download speeds up to 3.6 mbps.
BSNL announced tariff plans for 3G mobile services under pre-paid voice, video and data plans. The voice call will now be available for 30 paisa per minute and video calls will be available at the rate of voice calls for Local & STD.
BSNL is also offering affordable data usage at a rate of 1 paisa or less per 10 kilobytes (kb).
The state-owned telecom giant also announced that its existing 2G mobile services shall now be available at 1 paisa per second
Even as India’s mobile telephony sector has been able to buck the slowdown, the performance of government-owned BSNL and MTNL has been deteriorating, despite having a one-year lead in the launch of 3G services.
According to DoT’s latest data, both the companies are losing market share to private operators in the mobile telephony segment. BSNL and MTNL together are down from a 17% market share at the beginning of March 2008 to 13.6% in August 2009. In contrast, the private sector’s share jumped from 83% to 86.4% during the same period.
Indian state-run telecom Bharat Sanchar Nigam Ltd said on Tuesday it will lease bandwith and telecom towers to Sistema Shyam Teleservices Ltd, the Indian mobile unit of Russian oil-to-telecoms group Sistema.
The Sistema unit currently operates in seven of India’s 22 telecom zones and aims to extend its coverage to the remaining zones by end 2010.
>