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Commercial launch:(From left) The Vice President of SICCI, Mr Jawahar Vadivelu; the Vice-President of Huawei India, Mr Liu Zhan; the CGM- Chennai Telephones, Mr A. Subramanian; and the CGM, Southern Telecom Project, Mr P.R. Ananthan, at the commercial launch of 3G services, in Chennai on Friday. — Bijoy Ghosh

Our Bureau

Chennai, Nov. 20 The public sector telecom major, Bharat Sanchar Nigam Ltd, announced, on Friday, the commercial launch of 3G services in Chennai.

It is the first city in South India to get the third generation telecommunication services, capable of high speed voice, data and video transmission and downloads.

In February, the company had ‘soft-launched’ the services.

As a promotional offer, BSNL is offering voice and local video calls at 30 paise a minute. If you have a 3G handset, you can see the person you are talking to on the mobile phone.

Long distance video calls are offered at 50 paise a minute.

Also, as part of the promotional offer, 50 minutes of free local video call and 25 MB of free data usage is allowed to all 3G pre-paid and post-paid connections activated up to December 31, BSNL officials told a press conference here. For this purpose, BSNL has built 304 Node B (like towers) throughout the city and plans another 240 within the next two months.

Coverage in the city will be complete only when all the Node Bs are operational.

Equipment for the network has been supplied by BSNL’s vendor, Huawei of China.

BSNL said it intends to roll out the services throughout Tamil Nadu, gradually. The next city would be Coimbatore.

The company officials said that subscribers would be able to avail themselves of many services.

For instance, one could watch a TV programme live while travelling in a train and surf the Internet as well as download material at high speeds.

Other services such as video streaming and video-on-demand would become available over time.

While Chennai is the first city in South India to get 3G, the services are offered by BSNL and MTNL (Mahanagar Telephone Nigam Ltd) in 240 other cities and towns across the country.

More Stories on : Telecommunications | New Products & Services | Tamil Nadu

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