The Calcutta Telephones unit of government-owned Bharat Sanchar Nigam Ltd (BSNL) is back on the expansion track, after seeing its growth strangled for nearly a year by glitches in a networking and switching job and legal wrangles at the national level over a tender for capacity expansion.

BSNL, the country’s largest telecom service provider, now expects to give private sector rivals Bharti Airtel and Vodafone Essar a run for their money in acquiring new customers here.

Ericsson, the contractor for the second phase, is scheduled to begin work in December on expanding BSNL’s Kolkata circle from the existing 10 lakh lines to 13.75 lakh of 2.5G GSM lines and another 75,000 3G lines in the core network.

Calcutta Telephones officials said that, if the customer numbers for June-September are any indication, BSNL will easily add 40-45,000 customers a month in the next few months.

BSNL began the first modest push four months ago, after Nortel completed its work.

In June, BSNL roped in 28,117 new customers, in July 54,115 and in August 45,846 in Kolkata. “In September, we have added around 30,000 net to our existing customer base,” said SK Bhaduri, general manager for customer service.

Airtel added 68,618 customers here in June, 64108 in July and 49,803 in August. Over the same months, Vodafone added 45,057, 54,039 and 60,078 customers respectively.

Said Bhaduri: “In the next one year, we can easily add 45,000 customers a month, and there will be no capacity constraint.”

Supriya Datta, general manager for mobile maintenance, said that, if BSNL is allotted spectrum for 3G services over the next six months, Calcutta Telephones will be able to launch the service as it has 75,000 lines ready for 3G.

Today, on the 7 th anniversary of BSNL, Calcutta Telephones’ chief general manager SK Chakraborty said he expects to add 100,000 customers during the festive season and has launched a new scheme called Tricon.

Tricon is a bundle of basic, mobile and broadband where the subscriber need not pay monthly fixed charge for landline and broadband services.

Tricon is expected to improve the post-paid customer base in the mobile segment, like the Manikjod landline-plus-mobile scheme that helped BSNL add 1.8 lakh post-paid connections over the last four months.