India to have 250 mln subscribers within '07: Maran

New Delhi, Apr 25: The government will impose Rs 1,000 as penalty charges on the telecom operators for non-verification of customers identity.

''We would impose Rs 1,000 penalty per subscriber on telcos for non-compliance of TRAI's order for verification of customers identity,'' Communication and IT Minister Dayanidhi Maran told reporters here today.

In this direction, a sample survey has been done for gauging the performance of various telecom operators.

Reliance and Hutch have shown a good response verifying 93 per cent of their customers followed by Bharti with 90 per cent.

State-owned BSNL have cleared 86 per cent of their verifications while Spice telecom and Tata Teleservices have done pretty badly, he said.

Talking about broadband, Mr Maran said nine million connections will be rolled out by the year-end of which seven million will be contributed by BSNL and MTNL. ''We are trying to host web servers across the country in an attempt to reduce the bandwidth costs,'' a senior telecom official said adding BSNL has been asked to set up their own web servers.

A 42.5 MHz spectrum will be available by July while the 3G spectrum plan is in process, he said. When asked, Mr Maran said 3G is not an extension of 2G.

Meanwhile, the wireless services subscriber base at the end of March this year stood at 166.05 million as compared to 98.78 million in the same month last year, registering a growth of 68 per cent.

The month added 3.53 million wireless subscribers as against 6.21 million subscribers in February this year, figures released by Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI) said.

''This lower growth in March can be attributed to insistence by the government to ensure verification of subscribers,'' the telecom regulator said.

In the wireline segment, a total of 0.40 million subscribers were added during March'07 as compared to a decline of 0.02 million in February'07.

With this, the total subscriber base of wireline reached 40.78 million in March as against 41.54 million in March last year, registering a decline of 1.82 per cent.

The total telephony subscriber base (wireless and wireline) added 66.51 million subscribers during-fiscal 2006-07 to stand at 206.83 million at the end of the fiscal, an increase of 58 per cent over 2005-06.

During March alone, the subscriber base grew by 3.93 million.

The teledensity was 18.31 per cent at the end of March'07 as compared to 12.80 a year ago.

Broadband connections posted a growth of 70 per cent to touch 2.30 million at the end of March as compared to 1.35 million last year.

The broadband subscribers were 2.21 million in February last, thus adding 0.09 million subscribers in the month of March.

UNI