Southern States - Tamil Nadu-Chennai   

Chennai Telephones unveils Accountless Internet Service

By N. Ravi Kumar

CHENNAI JULY 23. Chennai Telephones today unveiled an Accountless Internet Service with which its landline subscribers can access the World Wide Web, and need not have to subscribe to an ISP account.

In effect, all subscribers possessing a computer and modem can surf the Internet, using the facility, at 10 paise per minute in addition to the prevailing usage tariff for the telephone.

Described as the "fastest and cheapest" by Chennai Telephones (www.chennai.bsnl.co.in) , the Accountless Internet Service is Caller Line Identity (telephone number) based and does not involve any paperwork to get started.

The registration process involves, selecting `My Computer' from the desktop, clicking on the dial-up networking and on the `make new connection'. The users then need to enter their name and the dialling code (172222) and click `finish'. Then, they have to click on the icon containing their name and in the dialup box enter the user ID and password as `netone' following which the account-free Internet site can be accessed. This has to be followed by typing the URL - http://netonechn.bsnl.co.in - and selecting `register' from the three menus and entering the user ID (telephone number). The choice of the password is up to the user.

Announcing the launch of the facility, across all the exchange serving the 10.60 lakh landline subscribers, at a media conference today, the Chief General Manager of Chennai Telephones, S.S. Iyer, said one of the key features of the service was that "there is no chance of the account being misused". There would be a separate entry detailing usage charges of the service in the telephone bill.

Expressing confidence that it would make a significant impact on the ISP market - there are an estimated 1.5 lakh dial-up users in the city - a senior official of the BSNL entity hoped the Accountless Internet Service to be of immense benefit to middle-class households, which are looking at used computers.

Pointing out that the introduction of the facility was part of the growing emphasis of BSNL to offer more value-added services, Mr. Iyer said Chennai Telephones would be launching the Answering Machine Service, to be made available free of any registration cost to all subscribers on request, by mid-August. The subscriber, however, would be charged a local call rate for retrieving the messages from the voice mailbox, which would have a capacity to store 10 messages of two minutes duration.

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