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Mr Kuldeep Goyal

Sumit Moitra

Kolkata, Nov. 7 Bharat Sanchar Nigam Ltd is eyeing a mobile subscriber base of 100 million by 2010-11 (April-March) against 39.17 million as of September-end, the Chairman and Managing Director, Mr Kuldeep Goyal, has said.

The telecom giant hopes to add 7-8 million subscribers by March-end and 25 million subscribers in 2009-10. He was speaking at the sidelines of BSNL’s CDMA data card launch here. The telecom operator has decided to procure 93 million lines to extend coverage of its global system for mobile communications services to all villages with a 1,000-plus population.

Vendors such as Ericsson, Nokia Siemens Networks, Alcatel-Lucent, Nortel Networks, Huawei Technology, and ZTE have bid for supplying the equipment, Mr Goyal had said recently. The bids are currently under technical evaluation, he said.

On rollout of 3G services, Mr Goyal said the company will first target cities in Punjab, Haryana, Uttar Pradesh, West Bengal and Orissa.

“We expect about 2 per cent of the country’s total mobile subscribers to shift to our 3G services once it is launched in January.” BSNL is also looking at an overseas mobile service foray.

“We have started looking at markets in Africa and Middle Eastern countries. We have made a bid in Middle East and are exploring other options,” Mr Goyal said. — © NewsWire18 Pvt. Ltd. 2008

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