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Bharti
to take franchisee route to network in TN
Padmaja
Shastri
Chennai, July 15: Come November and
getting a telephone connection in Chennai will be as easy
as buying soap—across the counter, says Mr K Krishnan, chief
executive officer of Bharti Telenet Limited. The Sunil Mittal-controlled
basic telecom service provider, which is expected to roll
out its services in the city by October this year, has decided
to take the franchisee route to expand its customer base quickly.
The company is also looking at setting up branded public call
offices (PCOs) and unmanned PCOs across the city.
| No takers
for BSNL’s pvt exchanges |
Though Bharat Sanchar Nigam Ltd (BSNL)
is already offering GEPABX (group electronic private automatic
branch exchange) they are neither freely available nor
aggressively promoted commercially.
For instance, in Chennai only four exchanges offer the
service with restrictive operating rules—can be installed
in only multi-storeyed buildings and only half a kilometer
of operating radius is allowed.
Also, incentives to the
operators are poor and initial
cost to the subscriber very low. It won’t be surprising
if many of them shift to private service providers like
Bharti and Reliance. |
According to Mr Krishnan, the company will
operate through franchisees for connecting all non-corporate
subscribers across Tamil Nadu and provide direct connections
only to corporate clients. “We want to be accessible to our
customers and it is easier through a local operator,” he said.
Around 96 per cent of the telephone subscribers are currently
from the non-corporate segment - residential subscribers and
PCO operators.
This will not only mean that the number of connections of
the company will increase dramatically, but revenue per line
given to the franchisee will also be high.
As multiple subscribers will be linked to one main line in
the system, it will make low-usage subscribers commercially
viable. Operating through franchisees will also save the company
a lot of labour cost and time.
Franchisees will have their own manpower and sales force who
will go door-to-door marketing and distributing our brand,
said Mr Krishnan.
The company expects an average revenue of around Rs 700 per
line per month, 25 per cent of which would go to the national
long distance operator (NLDO) and 12 per cent towards the
licence fee. At an average capital cost of Rs 25,000 per line,
the company expects to break-even in four to five years’ time,
according to Mr
Krishnan.
In the first phase three lakh installations are expected to
be made in Chennai at an investment of Rs 150 crore. Another
Rs 150 crore will be spent to bring seven other cities in
Tamil Nadu into the network by March 2002. They include Coimbatore,
Madurai, Trichy, Tirupur, Erode, Vellore and Salem.
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