(15 September 2008 5:30 pm)

NEW DELHI: State-owned telecom major Bharat Sanchar Nigam Ltd (BSNL) plans to extend broadband coverage to 1,48,000 villages over the next six months.

BSNL, which offers broadband across 3261 cities, will expand to 5000 cities by March 2009.

Said Communications and IT Minister Thiru A Raja, “Government will initially connect 5000 blocks by wireless broadband, soon after the allocation of the spectrum, with support from the USO fund. Villages coming within a radius of 10 km of the block headquarter shall be covered by such connectivity. This will benefit many institutional users like schools, public health centers, village panchayats and the community service centers (CSCs) which is meant to provide e-governance and data services to the rural areas. BSNL will play a major role in providing the wireless broadband connectivity as it has done in case of the shared mobile infrastructure scheme. In order to promote expansion of rural wire line and wire line based broadband services, government has recently decided to waive off the license fees for rural wire line.”

BSNL has already floated zonal tenders with plans to procure 93 million lines to extend coverage of GSM mobile services to all the villages in the country having more than 1000 population. The procurement of the lines will be done in a phased manner.

Through this expansion, BSNL will also introduce value added services like mobile TV, mobile broadband, MMS, location based services etc.

Also fixed monthly charges of Sulabh Plan under Fixed/WLL service in exchange system of more than 29,999 lines have also been reduced from Rs 120 to Rs 99.

BSNL is already providing telephone connections to 550,000 villages across the country. It has extended 11 million GSM connections in the rural areas. The company’s GSM coverage reaches out to about 256,000 villages, which means over 43 per cent of the total number of villages. Besides, it also covers 75 per cent of the villages through its WLL network.

The government plans to complete 500 million telephone connections by 2010 and 750 million connections by 2012.