Nov. 6, 2009 (The Hindu Business Line) --

BSNL’s mobile services shall be available at 1 paise per second for local and STD calls within its network. Calls to other networks shall be made available at 1.20 paise per second.

The move follows similar announcements by private players, including Bharti Airtel, Reliance Communications, Tata Teleservices and Vodafone (NASDAQ:VOD) Essar.

For those who want to remain on the minute-based tariff scheme, BSNL has announced 49 paise per minute for all local and STD calls. In this plan, SMS is priced at 49 paise .

This is the cheapest tariff by any operator on a per minute basis.

Airtel and RCom had recently dropped their charges to 50 paise a minute.

BSNL also announced that it will offer 30 paise a minute to subscribers taking a 3G connection. The operators were charging between 90 paise a minute and Rs 1.20 a minute for voice calls on 3G pre-paid cards. BSNL is the only pan-Indian player with 3G services.

So far the company has not been able to attract too many subscribers on its 3G platform. Migration from 2G to 3G has been made almost free of charge. It has also partnered Dell and Olive Telecommunication, the parent company of Haier Mobile, to launch embedded 3G Netbooks with high-speed Internet access.

Mr Kuldeep Goyal, CMD, BSNL, said, “We are quite hopeful that with these steps, the growth in our 3G customer base would accelerate further.”