(21 December 2006 6:00 pm)

MUMBAI: State-owned Bharat Sanchar Nigam Ltd. (BSNL) is planning to give a major push to broadband. The telecom major has decided to increase the speed by almost eight times, providing broadband up to 2 mb at Rs 250 per month.

The download has been increased by 2.5 times at almost half the cost, the company said. Till now the minimum bandwidth available to broadband customers was 256 Kbps. BSNL has now decided that all the home and business plans will offer data rates up to 2 Mbps, subject to technical feasibility.

"Under the new plan all the existing 820,000 customers are also being upgraded for the speed up to 2 Mbps, depending upon technical feasibility," BSNL said.

The following changes in broadband data rates and downloading limits will come into effect from 1 January. BSNL is going to add the five million port capacity to the existing network of one million ports. "We at present have a 44 per cent market share in this segment. We also hold the prime position as the largest internet service provider of the country," the company said.

The downloading limits in home 250 and business 700 plans have been enhanced to 1 GB and 4 GB from 400 MB and 2 GB respectively. The limits in other plans have been suitably enhanced. With the increase in downloading limit, a Plan 250 customer will get a benefit of Rs 840 per month for 1 GB limit and Business Plan 700 customer will get a benefit of Rs 2400 per month for limits up to 4GB.

BSNL has also decided to bring down the per MB downloading rates from Rs 1.40 per MB to Rs.0.90 per MB in Home 250 plan and the rates have also been lowered in other plans. The BSNL broadband service is available in 597 cities and towns.

The fixed monthly charges from ADSL modems has been reduced from Rs 100 to Rs 60 per month with effect from 1 December. This will benefit about 800000 customers of BSNL.

BSNL is already in the process of launching triple play services over broadband in Pune and subsequently in Chennai and Bangalore. It plans to start online gaming services over broadband soon under two categories, Standard and Premium packages, with monthly fixed charges of Rs 100 and Rs 200 respectively.