The Hindu Business Line : `BSNL (South) to focus on cost-cutting, effective distribution'

The national network management system will come up in Chennai to monitor all the 325 trunk auto exchange switches in India; it will control and divert traffic all over the country.

Mr K. Balakrishnan, CGM, Southern Telecom Region, BSNL.

"THE World Telecom day is an opportunity to offer more value to the end-customer. In the last decade, the focus has been on technological growth, but now we have to focus on cost cutting and effective distribution so that services reach a wide range of customers", according to Mr K. Balakrishnan, Chief General Manager, BSNL Southern Telecom Region (STR).

The theme for this year is equal distribution of information, he said.

He shared details of developments and also spoke of future plans for BSNL STR to Business Line.

What is the status on actually reaching the customer himself?

We propose to do this through the existing e-connectivity network. In the South, there is 95 per cent connectivity through fibre optic cables, as opposed to the 93 per cent national connectivity.

There is a 200-300 GB bandwidth at all prime locations.

The district headquarters have 40-80 GB bandwidth and the taluk headquarters have 2.5-8 MB bandwidth. It is now a question of reaching the end-customer beyond these levels.

What other areas has BSNL been working on?

BSNL is in four major areas — trunk automated exchanges (at centres in Chennai, Bangalore, Hyderabad, Ernakulam and Coimbatore), transmission through optical fibres, providing bandwidth to private operators and international long distance (ILD) and overseas call carriers.

The number of trunk exchange circuits has risen from 4 lakh to 5 lakh.

Of these, around 90,000 circuits are for private use. They generated a revenue of Rs 160 crore for the year ending March2005.

Private operators route inter-circle calls through BSNL, while they use their own lines for intra circle routing.

There has been an addition of 5,000-loop km of fibre optic cable added to the existing 50,000 loop km.

The cables are given to mobile service providers and landline operators to transfer voice, data and broadband traffic.

In the ILD carrier category, there exists contracts with Sri Lanka, Nepal, Canada and Italy.

Could you share your future business plans with us?

We are planning a KU-band based project for hilly areas to enable communication via VSATs. It would be coming up in the next few months.

This Rs 20-crore project will offer 34 MB (as against 8 MB currently) bandwidth to the retail user and will be monitored from Bangalore.

The charges for broadband connectivity would be higher, of course, than is currently given to urban centres.

To extend the ILD facility, more than Rs 200 crore will be invested to lay submarine cables from Tiruchendur to Sri Lanka and Kavaratti to Kochi.

Also, an independent ILD switch at the cost of Rs 20 crore will come up in a year.

Currently, we share the switch with VSNL.

Long-term plans are to shift from the time division multiplexing (TDM) technology to Internet protocol.

Any projects in Chennai?

The national network management system (NNMS) will come up in Chennai to monitor all the 325 trunk auto exchange switches in India. This will control and divert traffic all over the country. It is based on the network operations centre currently at Bangalore that controls traffic on leased lines (for private use).

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