The Hindu : Business : BSNL to offer broadband connectivity at 2 mbps

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Friday, Dec 15, 2006
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BSNL to offer broadband connectivity at 2 mbps

Special Correspondent

Maran asks private operators to match the offer

— PHOTO: R. V. MOORTHY

QUICKENING ACCESS: President A. P. J. Abdul Kalam (right), with IT and Communications Minister, Dayanidhi Maran, at the India Telecom 2006 conference in New Delhi on Thursday.

NEW DELHI: BSNL will offer high speed of broadband connectivity up to two mbps (megabits per second) to its subscribers who have till now been getting the connection at 256 kbps (kilo bits per second).

Making the announcement at the India Telecom 2006 conference here on Thursday, Communication and IT Minister Dayanidhi Maran said BSNL would be offering high speed Internet broadband at the existing price.

He said it was now for the private operators to match it or beat it.

Dwelling on `Vision 2010' for the telecom sector, he said the Government had set a target to more than triple the number of mobile connections to 500 million, provide handsets for Rs. 1,000 and increase the broadband speed

Earlier inaugurating the conference, President A. P. J Abdul Kalam called for transforming the telecom connectivity into a network to provide seamless access between the knowledge creators/converters and knowledge consumers.

He laid special emphasis on providing access to this knowledge to the citizens in their own language.

He spelt out this broad goal to ensure that the society at large, particularly the rural areas, benefited from the telecom revolution with India emerging as the fastest growing bandwidth market.

"This should be achieved through cost effective utilisation of our telecom resources such as land lines, optical fibre networks, switching and networking hardware and software,'' the President said.

The networking should facilitate connectivity between the knowledge creator and the knowledge converters on the one hand and the knowledge consumers, namely, the citizens, on the other.

He identified educational institutions, healthcare institutions, infrastructure providers and the Government as knowledge creators and R & D institutions and public and private sector industries, which transform knowledge into products and services, as knowledge converters.

Mr. Maran said the decision to provide support from the Universal Service Obligation (USO) Fund for mobile telephony as well as broadband services would open up the vast untapped market in the rural areas.

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