BSNL, MTNL ink pact to offer pan-India services

Bharat Sanchar Nigam Ltd and Mahanagar Telephone Nigam Ltd, the two state-run telecom operators, today signed a memorandum of understanding for providing pan-India solutions to customers.

The partnership will cover mobile communications, infrastructure sharing and enterprise business for information technology and telecom services.

While MTNL operates in Mumbai and Delhi, BSNL has the rest of the country. The two telecom public sector undertakings are currently not able to provide services throughout the country "on competitive basis" due to geographical restrictions as per licence conditions, while their privately-run rivals are providing pan-India services.

''We are going to provide cost-effective solutions for customers' pan-India requirements. We are going to share the resources of each other, which will ultimately bring down the cost of operations,'' R K Upadhayay, chairman and managing director of BSNL, said in New Delhi.

He said the two companies will use each other's infrastructure such as ducts, buildings, towers, intelligent network services and toll-free services. This will help BSNL and MTNL to improve customer services, he said.

''We will be signing service level agreement and are committed to provide the agreed service delivery and service assurance. An enterprise vertical on the similar pattern of BSNL has been also created in MTNL on the philosophy of customer segmentation. This will help us to design and provide customised services as per their need,'' MTNL chairman and managing director A K Garg said.

The companies are fully committed to provide pan-India services at most economical rates in a transparent manner, according to both the companies.

Under the agreement, MTNL would only use the network of BSNL for national roaming services for its subscribers except in Delhi and Mumbai.

In the same way, BSNL will only use the MTNL network for roaming services to its customers in Delhi and Mumbai.

MTNL would offer all its NLD (national long distance) traffic to BSNL except for the traffic between Delhi and Mumbai.

The agreement is expected to bring about greater synergy between the two organisations on operational issues, commercial issues, customer delivery, IT integration, infrastructure sharing and business promotion.

Both the firms signed the pact on mutually-agreed conditions for revenue sharing.