Following its public sector cousin Mahanagar Telephone Nigam Ltd, BSNL will rollout IPTV commercially in early January.
It is currently testing the service in Pune
MUMBAI: It’s coming from Bharat Sanchar Nigam Ltd (BSNL), too. Following its public sector cousin Mahanagar Telephone Nigam Ltd, BSNL will rollout IPTV commercially in early January.
Kuldeep Goyal, chief general manager, BSNL, told DNA Money, “We will provide IPTV in Delhi, Mumbai, Kolkata, Chennai, Bangalore and other cities in 2007. At present we are testing in Pune, though charges are yet to be decided.” The company has already roped in local partners in Chennai and Bangalore.
The services on IPTV include video-on-demand and digital video recording. IPTV uses a two-way digital broadcast signal, sent through a switched telephone or cable network by way of a broadband connection.
The viewer’s TV connects to a set-top box that decodes the IP video and converts it into standard television signals. The consumer can access different media by using the television remote to send control commands.
Two features make India an ideal breeding ground for IPTV - it has more TV sets than mobile phones and is on the verge of a broadband explosion.
The government has set a target 20 million broadband users by 2010 from around 1.3 million at the end of March. BSNL will invest Rs 1,500 crore to expand its broadband service to 1,000 more cities in the next two years from 400 cities now and towns now. In the Maharashtra circle, which has 70,000 broadband connections today, some 2.4 lakh lines are planned to be added by the end of this fiscal.
BSNL is also aggressively expanding in the rural and remote areas. The company, which has so far provided 3653 village public telephones (VPTs) in the country, hopes to meet its target of 6,052 VPTs by the fiscal-end.
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