Hyderabad, October 23: Bharat Sanchar Nigam Limited (BSNL) will launch a new scheme on November 1 to promote broadband use in rural areas.
Addressing a press conference here today, BSNL chairman and managing director Kuldeep Goyal said that the proposed `PC bundling scheme’ would provide its rural customers a package of personal computer, broadband facility and useful software at subsidised cost and on payment of 24 easy instalments of about Rs 300 each.
Simple broadband tariff packages costing as low as Rs 99 will be offered to rural customers.
He said that 23,000 of the 29,000 rural exchanges had been enabled broadband connectivity in the State and the others would be covered soon providing 100 broadband connectivity.
T he 3-G service will be introduced in 27 towns in the State in a phased manner. In the first phase, the service will be launched in 12 towns, including Hyderabad, by the end of November. Mobile number portability will be introduced by March next to enable a mobile phone customer to retain the number on change of service provider.
Infrastructure upgradation had been carried out at an additional cost of about Rs 1,000 crore. Stating that the number of landline connections was on the decline, Goyal said that the BSNL had initiated several revenue-generating measures to retain the total revenues of Rs 35,000 crore in the present financial year as achieved during the last year.
Revenue generation plans such as sharing infrastructure would be introduced, he said and added that BSNL would take up services in other countries as well.
–Agencies