BSNL all set to launch gaming services in 2007

Bangalore Dec 30: Bharat Sanchar Nigam Limited (BSNL) is all set to launch gaming services and triple play services in selected cities in the new year.

BSNL Director (Planning and New Services) R L Dube talking to newsmen here today said the gaming services would be launched in the second week of January to enable gamers use broadband connections effectively sitting from home.

On triple play service, where consumers could access telephone and internet services and get video on demand, he said that the services were already being implemented on a trial basis in Pune.

Shortly it would be introduced in Bangalore and Chennai where India online (IOL) is the company's partner in the venture.

In Triple Play services IPTV would also become popular, he said.

In Pune, BSNL had partnered with the Maharashtra Knowledge Corporation and Divinet. The private partner for Hyderabad was being finalised, Mr Dube said.

Mr Dube was here in connection with the launch of Web Hosting, Web Colocation and Message hosting services introduced by BSNL for the first time.

He said BSNL's Data Centre with a capacity of 80 terabytes was already functional in Bangalore. Set up at a cost of Rs 100 crore, the centre would be expanded further next year with an additional investment of Rs 100 crore. Supporting data centres have also been set up in Mumbai and Noida with Pune hosting the Disaster centre.

The Bangalore Data centre would host the new services with technical support from Tata Consultancy Services and IBM, he added.

He said BSNL was also in talks with Internet Service Providers outside the country to partner with them on implementation of Voice On Internet Protocol (VoIP).

He said beginning January 2007 broadband charges would crash by 80 per cent besides providing customers a high speed connectivity that would benefit gamers and other highend data downloading.

Mr Dube said BSNL would be investing Rs 2,000 crore in the new year to expand broadband capacity by five million to the existing one million broad band connections. So far BSNL had made an investment of Rs 1,000 crore. With little assitance from the Department of Information Technology, 1.8 million broadband connections would be made available for Rural India, he added.

Mr Dube said Web hosting would be provided on a new infrastructure that was much more advanced and provide enhanced experience for the users. Some new features being offered were Windows/Unix based hopsting, domain name hosting, DB hosting (MySQL/Oracle), besides providing multiple email IDs per domain with flexible mail quota. Web Co-location services would offer biometric access control, surveillance system, building management system and complete network security.

He said without investing in costly infrastructure any Small and Medium Enterprise could avail messaging solution from BSNL.

He said tariff for web hosting and web co-location services had been drastically reduced by more than 80 per cent over the existing rates.

UNI