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Our Bureau

Chennai, Nov. 5 In an attempt to reduce the rate of landline surrenders, Bharat Sanchar Nigam Ltd (BSNL) plans to launch one new value added service (VAS) every month for landline users.

“We realise that our landline ARPU (average revenue per user) is dependent on VAS revenues and we plan to replicate all services available on the mobile to landline,” said Mr Kuldeep Goyal, Chairman and Managing Director, BSNL, at a press conference today. When asked what the landline surrender rate for BSNL was, Mr Goyal did not share the number but said VAS would help bring down the number.

BSNL offers interactive voice recognition based services and would add more services to the existing portfolio. It also offers ‘triple play’ services (voice, data and video) and has launched IPTV broadcast in Bangalore, Pune and Kolkata.

“Gradually we plan to launch this through a franchisee model in more cities,” Mr Goyal said. In such a model, content providers willing to broadcast content approach BSNL and use its infrastructure to do so. Chennai would have an IPTV service in the next few months, he said.

The public sector company today launched a personalised ring back tone service for landline subscribers called ‘BSNL Tunes’ on the lines of mobile ring tones. About 22 per cent of landline subscribers in Chennai currently have access to it and launches in other cities would follow soon.

When asked about BSNL’s spectrum efficiency in the context of the current subscriber linked spectrum allocation policy, Mr Goyal said the company’s spectrum utilisation was “on par” with that of other private companies and it did not have any surplus spectrum to surrender if the policy was implemented. Additionally, the company is looking at ways to improve efficiency and is coming out with a proposal for ERP implementation.

BSNL currently has 6.7 crore subscribers including over 3.2 crore landline, 35 lakh wireless local loop (WLL) and about 3 crore mobile subscribers.

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