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Kripa Raman

Mumbai , Sept. 25

BHARAT Sanchar Nigam Ltd, which has notched up a dramatic customer base for its CellOne service within less than a year of its launch, is now in danger of starving the golden goose. The apprehension is on account of poor anticipation of capacity requirement, low value-added services and slow tendering process for capacity augmentation.

Although the state-owned company placed a limited tender (floated a month or two ago) for GSM equipment for 2.5 million cellular lines, calling bids from its existing three vendors — Ericsson, Motorola and ITI Ltd — BSNL marketing officials fear that by the time the tender delivers the equipment, the company might lose further ground in the market place.

"Our tendering process takes at least six months, give or take a couple of months, and we are already squeezed for equipment," said a senior marketing official with BSNL.

Already BSNL's subscriber growth rate is flagging. With over 36.87 lakh customers as of August 31, it is still the second largest operator in the country, after the Bharti group, which has 43.89 lakh customers. However, the company that added 2.96 lakh customers in July this year, added only 1.98 lakh customers in August; whereas, the Bharti group, which added 2.84 lakh to its base in July, acquired 3.53 lakh in August.

BSNL's capacity of around four million lines can actually be augmented by 25 per cent and yet the exhaustion of capacity has not happened uniformly across the country. Officials in the central office of BSNL said the UP (East) circle was finding it difficult to take on new customers; in the Maharashtra circle, there were no capacities left in Aurangabad whereas capacity was still available in the Nagpur and Pune areas.

"Truly, we did not anticipate such a response," said a senior BSNL official. "Our equipment suppliers have also under-dimensioned our switches and now we are talking to them to have our switches sufficiently dimensioned."

Customers from places as far apart as Chennai and Ludhiana are complaining of call drops or poor signals. SIM cards are not available in Kota, says one complaint and still another complainant says BSNL cellular prepaid cards have not been available in Jaipur for at least six months.

One unique complaint from Kharagpur says BSNL SIM cards are only available in the blackmarket for Rs 2,000 a piece. BSNL officials admit that in several localities in the hinterland where, being the cheapest service, BSNL is much in demand, SIM cards are sold at a premium.

Its latest offer for students has also been a trifle disappointing because BSNL's SMS service is not yet an everywhere-to-everywhere service "Each circle in BSNL has to have SMS interconnectivity signed with each other operator in its circle. We are doing it one by one, because this means that almost 50 interconnectivity agreements must be made," said another BSNL official. "Till this happens, SMS can only selectively go through."

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