BSNL plans 5 million mobile connection addition
To consolidate its position in the highly competitive cellular market, the Bharat Sanchar Nigam Limited (BSNL) has decided to expand its GSM capacity across India. Starting from the southern States, for which it has placed orders to add 5 million new connections, the State-owned telecom company will soon be floating more tenders for other regions.
To avoid any operational or legal hurdle, senior officials have decided to go ahead with the existing vendors for telecom circles in the southern States so that capacity expansion plan can be completed without any delay and more lines added to counter the challenge being posed by the private mobile operators.
The BSNL wants to come out from the last year’s setback when its mega tender of 45-million lines was curtailed by half.
“Apart from the South, we are also adding our capacity so that we can catch up with other telecom players. In the North and East regions, around 15-million new lines will be added. These additions will not only meet our future requirements but will also help us in achieving our aim of reaching 100 million subscriber base by 2010, with a market share of 33 per cent,” said a senior official.
The BSNL, which was ranked second a year back, has been slipping in ranking as private players have been regularly expanding their network and adding more subscribers.
Delay in capacity expansion has been hurting expansion of the BSNL’s mobile subscriber base.
With 3.7-crore subscribers, the BSNL is ranking fourth among all mobile companies, the leading firms being Airtel (5.7-crore subscribers), Reliance mobile (4.2-crore), and Vodafone (4.1-crore) respectively.
Among the four, Reliance Communications is the only company whose services are mainly based on CDMA platform, while the other three use GSM technology.
Among the GSM mobile operators, the competition is stiff between four leading operators — Bharti Airtel, Vodafone-Essar, BSNL and Idea (2.1-crore subscribers). Last month, mobile companies added a record 87.7-lakh new mobile subscribers, for the first time surpassing even monthly additions by the Chinese companies.
While Bharti Airtel added over 22-lakh new subscribers in January 2008, Vodafone Essar added 12.8-lakh, BSNL 11.8-lakh and Idea 9-lakh. “New capacity building will also help us to retain our leadership position again in the highly competitive Indian mobile market,” the official added.
For mobile related discussion visit Mobile Forum
