BSNL joins per-sec billing war

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New Delhi: The country’s second largest telecom operator, BSNL, on Friday joined the tariff war by introducing the per-second billing plan. With this move, the state-run telecom operator becomes the last pan–India incumbent operator to introduce this tariff plan.

Under the new billing plan, users would be able to make local and STD calls within the BSNL network at the rate of one paisa per second, chairman & managing director Kuldeep Goyal said.

Under another plan, local and STD calls to any network will be charged at 49 paise per minute. BSNL also announced a lower tariff 3G services plan, under which voice calls will be charged at 30 paise per minute. Private telcom operators such as Vodafone, Bharti Airtel, Reliance Communications, Tata Teleservices, and Aircel have already introduced per-second billing plans.

Commenting on the company’s plans to bid for the African operation of the West Asia-based operator Zain Telecom, Goyal said BSNL was considering the option to wait and bid all by it self rather than join the Vavasi consortium.

BSNL also justified the disqualification of Nokia Siemens from its mega tender, saying the Finnish company did not provide specification with regard to subscriber information (known as home location register) as was the requirement. BSNL’s tender technical specification had very clearly stated that HLR (which contain subscriber data) and home subscriber server (HSS), containing subscriber data for 3G services, should be a single logical entity.

After NSN’s allegation that there was no transparency in selecting the bidders for its 93 million GSM lines expansion, the matter was referred to a two-member integration panel authorised by the CVC to scrutinise NSN’s complaint and BSNL’s views.

The panel gave a clean chit to the telecom PSU, but it is believed that the absence of adequate competition may force BSNL to go for re-inviting bids and the development may delay the process by several months. BSNL said it has placed purchase order for mobile equipment for 20 million GSM lines for the south zone with Chinese firm Huawei and will not call for any fresh bids. Goyal said the firm is also in advanced stages of negotiations with Ericsson for the north (25 million) and east (18million) zones.

BSNL has also entered into strategic partnerships with PC maker Dell and Olive Telecommunications, the parent company of Haier Mobile, for launching embedded 3G netbooks.