The Hindu Business Line : BSNL plans big broadband push in 4 States

Of the 198 cities being covered by the state-owned company for offering broadband services, 21 cities are from the southern State. These include Chennai, Coimbatore, Erode, Ooty, Vellore, Tuticorin, Tirupur, Karur, Madurai, Salem and Pondicherry.

BSNL is also rolling out broadband services aggressively in Maharashtra where 20 cities are being covered. Maharashtra has the highest number of Internet subscribers in the country at around 13 lakh.

The other States where BSNL will push in a major way is Gujarat and Andhra Pradesh where about 17-18 cities are being covered.

The other state-owned company, Mahanagar Telephone Nigam Ltd, will cater to the subscribers in Delhi and Mumbai, which has the second largest Internet user population. Taking advantage of a favourable broadband policy announced by the Government, MTNL and BSNL plan to target one million subscribers each by end-2005.

With the Government not allowing local loop unbundling and deferring the implementation of any fiscal incentives, which would have benefited the private sector operators, the onus of broadband penetration is on the two public sector companies.

MTNL has floated a tender for procuring 2.73 lakh ports on a turnkey basis. The equipment will be ordered in two phases and commissioning will be completed by December 2004. MTNL is targeting 50 lakh broadband users by June 2005.

BSNL will roll out its broadband network on its own across 198 cities with an aim to garner 0.6 million subscribers by next year. Around 0.4 million users are being targeted through the franchisee model.

Through a project - National Internet Backbone Phase-II - BSNL is deploying multi-gigabit, multi-protocol IP infrastructure to provide voice, data and video through the same backbone.

In Kerala, broadband will be initially rolled out in 10 cities including Ernakulam, Kozhikode, Palghat, Trichur and Thiruvananthapuram. In Karnataka, BSNL plans to cover 14 cities, which include Bangalore, Belgaum, Hubli, Mangalore and Mysore.

Cities in the North East and Jharkhand are also on BSNL's broadband map.