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N. Ramakrishnan

`With the new telephone rates slated to come into effect from April, more people will opt for the DSL service and all Bharti's exchanges in the State are equipped to offer this service.'

CHENNAI, Feb. 18

BHARTI Telenet Ltd, which provides the Touchtel fixed line telephone services in Tamil Nadu, expects its DSL (Digital Subscriber Line) service to catch on from April, once the new tariff rates for basic telephone services come into effect.

At present, the company has about 5,000 subscribers for its DSL service in Tamil Nadu and more subscribers are opting for this facility, according to the Chief Executive Officer of Bharti Telenet, Mr K. Krishnan. The DSL enables the subscriber to browse the Internet at higher download speeds and still use the telephone connection.

According to Mr Krishnan, at present a person using the Internet for 30 minutes a day has to pay Rs 16, including the cost of the telephone use and to the Internet service provider. However, for those using the Net for a longer time, the bill will be much higher.

Therefore, the DSL is a cheaper option as it allows the persons to surf the Net for a longer time and use the phone, for Rs 1,000.

With the new telephone rates slated to come into effect from April, more people will opt for the DSL service and all Bharti's exchanges in the State are equipped to offer this service, Mr Krishnan told Business Line.

According to him, Bharti hopes to add at least 10,000 subscribers to its telephone service before the end of this financial year. At present, it has 60,000 subscribers in the State, of which 45,000 are in Chennai.

About 10,000-12,000 subscribers now are from the PCO and corporate segment, and the remaining from the household sector, according to him. The company has an installed capacity of 1.40 lakh lines now. Mr Krishnan said Bharti had, right from the beginning, made customer service its selling point.

It was a result of this that a number of large foreign banks and some foreign missions had switched over completely to Touchtel's service, he said.

For instance, he said, Bharti Telenet had separate teams focusing on each of its user segments. And, installation and fault repair teams would work depending on the convenience of the subscriber.

If a subscriber wanted the line to be installed only after office hours, the installation team would do just that, he said. Likewise, some residences insisted on the fault being repaired either early in the morning or in the evening. Accordingly, Bharti had re-positioned teams to ensure this was done, he said.

Mr Krishnan said the time to install a telephone line was on an average three days while it took, on an average, two-three hours to rectify a fault.

He said that Bharti had fully covered Chennai and hoped to cover the suburbs such as Tambaram and Pallavaram next year.

Likewise, it had covered Madurai, Coimbatore and Tiruppur and was waiting for point of interconnect to launch the services in Vellore, Hosur and Pondicherry.

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