India’s leading ISP and international bandwidth carrier, VSNL along with Tata Indicom is set to live with IT Minister’s words in making 2007 a year of broadband in India.
VSNL said that the cost of building wired broadband infrastructure per consumer is approximately Rs 20,000 and the same using Wimax deployment is Rs 25,000. VSNL however expects the WiMax based deployment costs to go down substantially in the next few years. VSNL is testing WiMax deployment in parts of Bangalore / Bengalooru city using Tata Indicom’s towers but unsure when it will be made available to the consumer.
In a related development, after tying up with PC vendors, security firms are selling subscriptions of Anti-Virus Packages and Firewalls through Internet Service Providers in India.
F-Secure leading Security Solutions company has tied up with Reliance Broadband and Tata Indicom Broadband to sell subscriptions mainly targeted at the booming Small and Medium Enterprise Market in India. Mr. P Venugopal Raja of F-Secure said,
Telcos are offering security not only as a revenue opportunity but also to reduce the churn.
However, in India the churn is inevitable because of lack of customer service. At least I am not happy with Tata Indicom’s service in Bangalore.