BSNL to invest big, to borrow Rs 6,000 crores

BSNL to invest big, to borrow Rs 6,000 crores

Government owned telecom giant Bharat Sanchar Nigam Limited (BSNL) has announced plans to invest over Rs 19,400 crore during the next financial year on expanding their operations in the domestic market. These investments would mainly be done in expansion of its mobile and broadband services.

Most of the investment money would be coming from inside company’s own coffers. Though, they are likely to borrow close to Rs 5,000-6,000 crore from the market. They have finalized the investment plan and are waiting for approval from the planning commission. S D Saxena, Director (Finance), BSNL confirmed that nearly 80 per cent of the investment would go into expansion of mobile network and broadband.

In addition, they would also be working on upgradation of switching system, wireless, and other IT related services. This expansion in their GSM technology based services would be part of their mega plan to the proposed mega tender for 60 million GSM lines. This would require the investment to the tunes of USD 4 Billion.

Saxena also added that considering the huge competition in the telecom market, broadband would become one of the main targets of the company to expand their operations in. the company is struggling to retain their customers in the landline market and are offering discounted rentals to keep the user base hooked on to their services.

Saxena said in a statement: “With good quality of services and the recent tariff cut, we are sure to arrest the trend and hope to retain our customers and broadband is likely to play an important role for this.” However, if we are to take the customer opinion, what they want is better customer support and marketing efforts from the company. In addition to unlimited data transfer broadband packages.