| The total contract, valued at about Rs 300 crore, for the deployment of one million PBX systems by the year-end, would be divided between three vendors, BSNL executives said. |
| The innovative scheme called Free Private Branch Exchange (PBX), targeted at corporates houses, housing societies, apartments and industries, provides for free deployment of the state-of-the-art systems capable of providing both voice and high-speed data connectivity at the customer premises. |
| The supply, installation, operation and maintenance of the entire system would be done by BSNL through the vendors. |
| According to BSNL executives, services such as voice calls, video conferencing, voice mail, net connectivity and a host of other personalised telephone applications would be provided by the PSU, through its network, at market rates. |
| As per the revenue sharing agreement, the vendors would be provided with about 20 per cent of the revenues generated through these high-end services for five years. |
| At present, India has a little over 2.5 million PBX lines and industry analysts estimate revenues from these services to account for over Rs 600 crore. |
| "The advantage here is that both the customer and the service provider bears no equipment costs," says Rajesh Tuli, managing director, Coral Telecom. |
| "Under the new scheme, new market avenues will open up and market size will expand as customers who do not have the sanction for making capital investments will be able to avail of this facility. Also, those using technologically obsolete systems can also replace their equipment faster," he adds. |
| For BSNL, the deployment will help it network these switches across different cities for multilocation offices of its customers, enabling it to take on private players and cater to the needs of large customers, the executive adds. |
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