BSNL picks Chennai for online triple play

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Colombo, Nov 17: Bharat Sanchar Nigam Ltd, the country’s largest telecom operator, will launch its online triple-play broadband service of voice, data and video first in Chennai and Pune by January next year, according to AK Sinha, chairman and managing director.

After these two cities, the triple-play services would be available in Bangalore and Kolkata.

Sinha declined to provide the exact tariff structure. “The base tariff should be below Rs 500 and consumers can top it up according to their needs,” Sinha said.

BSNL has been planning to offer the triple-play services for some time now. Now, according to Sinha, the time has come to launch it as broadband is available in 500 Indian cities and the operator is in a position to provide on-demand high speed bandwidth in metros and major cities of the country.

To see a Hindi movie over broadband network, speeds of above 500kbps are required to enjoy all the features with good voice quality.

The service would ride on BSNL’s broadband network and would serve the major cities by the end of the 2007, Sinha said.

To make the triple-play work with sufficient bandwidth across the country and not limited to few cities, BSNL aims to add 2.5 million broadband lines every year with an investment of Rs 500 crore.

“In the next three years we will have around 6.5 million new broadband lines in the country,” Sinha said.

BSNL has decided to award the implementation of the broadband expansion to four players --- UT Starcom, ZTE, Siemens and ITI. “We have changed the entire hardware configuration to help us monitor the quality of service better,” said Sinha.

At present, BSNL has 800,000 broadband clients in 500 towns. The new lines would help BSNL to connect 900 towns by March 2007 and 1800 towns by March 2008.

The BSNL chief was here to participate in the 5th CEO Conclave of Saarc region telecom operators organised by Voice & Data.

The public sector operator is looking for multiple tie-ups with content service providers. The content providers would help BSNL to provide on-demand video services in films, plays, sports and popular shows.

“At present our only missing link is content service providers. We have decided to have local alliance rather than with few national majors. The content alliances would be in place in the next few months,” said Sinha.