State-run telecom operator Bharat Sanchar Nigam Ltd (BSNL) has awarded a contract worth Rs.1,000 crore to a consortium led by Larsen & Toubro for setting up about 35,000 public Wi-Fi hotspots by March next year.
“We plan to roll out phase-II of the Wi-Fi programme through our own capital expenditure. We will install 35,500 Wi-Fi hotspots across the country by March 2018,” BSNL chairman Anupam Shrivastava said.
The contract has been awarded through an open tender. Under phase-I, BSNL has set up 4,500 Wi-Fi hotspots through a revenue sharing model with local partners and systems integrators.
Our Wi-Fi hotspots will act as 4G hotspots so that mobile users can seamlessly shift from 3G to 4G and vice versa to access data services at high speed — at about 100 megabit per second (Mbps), Shrivastava said.
BSNL has been banking on its landline/broadband and Wi-Fi services to increase revenues. A revival is expected by 2018.
On Tuesday, BSNL cut down by half the monthly rental for unlimited calling from landline to any network on Sundays and night hours to Rs.49 from Rs.99.
“To attract new customers to experience wireline services, BSNL launched a very cost effective and affordable promotional landline voice plan Experience LL 49,” the company said in a statement.
BSNL also changed the duration (pulse) of each local call from BSNL landline to two minutes from previous three minutes. It is also offering 1 gigabyte (GB) data at just Rs.36. In this offer, customers will get 8 GB for Rs.291 plan with a validity of 28 days as against 2 GB provided earlier.
To maintain its growth trajectory, BSNL is countering the offers being doled out by other operators, including Reliance Jio.
“Jio is bound to disrupt the market. And it’s quite possible to see a huge customer exodus due to its initial offerings. However, BSNL is in a position to take on that challenge. Our strength lies in landline and optical fibre assets, which can offer faster data speed at cheaper rates. We will match Jio’s offers step by step, but our priorities will be landlines and optical fibre cable networks. The market will consolidate more and only four to five operators are going to survive in the long run. And BSNL will certainly be one of them,” Shrivastava had said earlier in an interview to InfraCircle.

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