With a revenue generating revival plan in place, Bharat Sanchar Nigam Ltd has chalked out a set of customer-centric plans to retain its market.
While holding on to its dominant position in the landline category where it defines tariff, the company tries to keep its pricing lower than private players in mobile telephony. In conversation withBusinessLine, Anupam Shrivastava, Chairman and Managing Director, BSNL, shares the company’s plans to retain its market position. Edited experts:
Having left behind by the private players in the mobile telephony race, how do you propose to lure and retain your customer base?
Agreed we lost crucial years, but we now want to turn our disadvantage into our advantage. Wi-Fi hotspot is a win-win for us. We are also integrating these hotspots with our mobile network, so virtually these will act as 4G hotspots.
When our mobile customers go to the hotspot zone, they will not have to bother about username, password or buying vouchers, as their sessions will automatically be transferred to the 4G network. Therefore, these hotspots will virtually become a part of mobile network.
Our plan is to launch better schemes. We are coming out with schemes that appeal across the industry. One such scheme is night unlimited calls on landline (9 p.m. to 7 a.m.) anywhere in the country, to any network. This is generating a lot of demand and people who had disconnected their landlines are coming back to it.
We have also launched national free roaming for our mobile customers on June 15. We plan to launch more innovative schemes and make customers stress-free.
What are the other schemes in the pipeline?
We are waiting for next generation technology (NGN) to reach a threshold so that we can offer various services that are common to landline and mobile. In next two-three months, we will see newer schemes coming up. Just imagine if a customer can carry the landline on mobile…the convergence part will ease on calling through mobile from the landline number.
Where are you sourcing the equipment for such services?
NGN we are sourcing from Chinese firm, Huawei, for the urban areas.
For rural areas, we are procuring it from Centre for Development of Telematics (C-DOT).
All our rural exchanges are run on C-DOT and once we go for NGN, it will play an important role for us. For Wi-Fi, we have tied-up with QuadGen for southern and western regions, and Trimax IT Infrastructure and Services for northern region. For the eastern and north-east parts of the country we will float tenders.
Some companies have increased data tariff. Do you also plan to do so?
Since we are leader in the landline business, we define the tariff, and others follow it. But, in mobile area, we are not a leader, so we follow others. We try to keep our tariffs lower than rest in mobile category.
But, as of now, we have no intention to do so, as that will hamper our plans of providing free calls and roaming.
How have you worked out your investment plans?
We had prepared a capital expenditure of ₹39,000 crore for five years in 2011-12 that would go into our core network, Wi-Fi network, data and optical fibre.
We are doing this through our internal resources and loans from banks.
This industry is heavily debt-ridden, but compared with others, we are the least debt-ridden company (₹5,800 crore).
We went to banks and they are eager to give us money, as we are armed with ‘AAA’ rating from Care agency. Though we have had discussions with international banks, too, but at this point, we are looking at only domestic banks for long-term and short-term borrowings.
(This article was published on June 25, 2015)