BSNL eyes Rs 500 crore from virtual operator business in 1 year

NEW DELHI: Bharat Sanchar Nigam Ltd expects to garner at least Rs 500 crore from the mobile virtual network operator (MVNO) business annually, its chairman said on Tuesday, when the state-run telecom operator joined hands with mobile payment provider AdPay to launch India’s first virtual telecom firm, Aerovoyce.

The telco will get Rs10-15 crore in the first year for leasing out bulk data and voice minutes to AdPay, which has launched MVNO service in Tamil Nadu including Chennai circle over former’s 2G and 3G network, before a pan-India roll-out.

“We expect to get Rs500 crore from the VNO (virtual network operator) business in the first year on an incremental basis,” BSNL chairman Anupam Shrivastava said, adding that MVNO offers an opportunity as a good revenue driver.

Consumers, he said, will be able to get special services and virtual private firms could fill in the gap, particularly customer interaction, where BSNL was a little lacking.

Shrivastava said that even as Reliance Jio Infocomm’s entry has made competition tougher for the MVNO business, the market remains lucrative for other firms.

An MVNO provides telecom services without owning either spectrum or network infrastructure.

It relies on the network of its partner telecom company to provide services to customers under its brand name. It does so by buying bulk talk time and bandwidth from an operator, and selling it to users.

Experts, however, said while India’s top telcos are unlikely to enter into MVNO pacts since they don’t have excess bandwidth, it could be beneficial for the likes of BSNL and MTNL which have sizeable excess or idle capacity on their networks.