Bpl-Us West Aims At 4% Penetration

BPL-US West, the cellular licencee for Tamil Nadu(excluding Chennai) is targeting a 3.5-4 per cent penetration in the towns where it will be providing cellular telephony.

"We have 16,000 subscribers now with barely 23 towns covered. By the end of the current financial year, the number of towns where the service will be available will increase to 66," said Deepak Varma, head of BPL-Mobile operations in Tamil Nadu and Pondicherry.

"Every month we will be bringing 2-3 towns under the network," he said while talking to Business Standard from Coimbatore.

Going by the department of telecommunication's (DOT) licencing requirements, 50 per cent of district headquarters in the state will have to be covered in three years time.

But, BPL Mobile is looking more at the smaller towns that are on the periphery of major industrial towns like Coimbatore, Tiruppur, Erode, Salem, Madurai etc.

Businessmen in these towns often commute and do business with the neighbouring small towns, Varma pointed out.

"As customers get used to having the mobile, the benefits will become more tangible. A long-distance call on the mobile will be 40 per cent cheaper than regular subscribers trunk dialing (STD) calls on DOT land lines," Varma said.

Although the number of subscribers and the usage time per user is "not as high as initially projected", Varma was confident of achieving the target.

The company plans to draw up specific price schemes for its different market segments. "Doctors, for instance said Varma, do not want to pay for calls made by patients. We, therefore, structured a specific scheme for use by this segment of consumers. Similarly, there are separate tariff schemes for those in the media business," he said.

Recently, the company also introduced a simple two-part tariff that will be for 12 hours each. Charges range from Rs 5 per minute at the higher end to Rs 2.5 a minute.