Kochi : The Bharat Sanchar Nigam Ltd (BSNL) has commissioned its National Internet Backbone (NIB) here. With this , the BSNL will have its server in Kochi and directly provide Internet and leased line services, thus giving a boost to the Internet connectivity in the state. This should also offer stiff competition to other ISPs.BSNL sources said that as the dedicated lines would be directly provided from the major exchanges to the Internet concentrator, bypassing the public switched telephone network, connectivity from the state would improve in a big way. Also, there would be vast improvement in the connectivity and connection throughput.
BSNL has gone in for major sops to attract connections. There will be no registration fee and access between 11 pm and 8 am would be free of cost. It has made changes in its packages too. But for the 25-hour and 50-hour demo packages, all the other standard dial-up packages have a two-year validity. For the earlier ones, there will be a six-month and one-year validity, respectively.
For the 100-hour executive package, the charge will be Rs 500, for the 200-hour silver pass Rs 1,000 and for the 500-hour gold pass Rs 2,300. The corporate package of 1,000 hour would cost Rs 4,500. BSNL sources said all these packages were cheaper than the VSNL ones.
BSNL has also reduced its leased line costs. For the 64 kbps line the charge will be Rs 5 lakh per annum with a one-time registration fee of Rs 20,000 and and installation and testing charge of Rs 10,000. For the 2 mbps line, the cost is Rs 41.8 lakh per annum with a registration fee of Rs 50,000 and installation charge of Rs 10,000.
BSNL is to reduce the surfing charges at its PCOs to Rs 10 for 20 minutes. The Nigam is also to provide ISDN dial-up access. It has a personal package of 100 hours for Rs 1,000, 500 hours for Rs 4,500 and 1,000 hours for Rs 8,000.
Users in Kochi can now dial into the Sancharnet server, snacharnet.in, whose access number is 172233. Work is on now to provide access to the state from other parts of the state. This state-of-the-art server is connected to the international gateway in Chennai and Bangalore with an 8 mbps bandwidth. There is also a standby connection to Coimbatore and Mysore. All metros are now linked to the NIB. This would mean that users within the country would not have to pass through the international gateway.
Users of BSNL will now have a new e-mail id username@sancharnet.in. Those connected to the VSNL server in Chennai can, if they want, now shift to the BSNL server.
Copyright © 2000 Indian Express Newspapers (Bombay) Ltd.
