Generous advantage
In addition to losing ground to aggressive new operators, BSNL hasn’t been able to capitalize on its early-mover 3G advantage. As a state-run company it was granted 3G spectrum early in 2009 – a generous advantage in a market desperately short of spectrum.
Its privately-owned rivals must wait for the government’s long-delayed 3G spectrum auction, originally proposed for January 2009 and now deferred to at August or September 2010 at the earliest.
In a market as large and untapped as India, BSNL’s 3G services should have been a roaring success. But that hasn’t happened.
One reason is value-added services are more for high-end customers, most of whom are unlikely to have BSNL connections because of its reputation for poor customer service, Gupta says. Moreover, Reliance and Tata already offer some services that BSNL does over 3G, so customers have other value-added service provider options.
“The initial response had been slow, but sales have picked up gradually with the expansion of the service to new areas,” Goyal told telecomasia.net.
Since the 3G launch last March, BSNL has rolled out 3G services in 318 cities, with 856,000 subscribers, he said. BSNL is adding around 2 million new mobile subscribers every month.
BSNL is said to have failed to market its 3G services effectively. “In India 3G is often mistakenly viewed as an infrastructure play, but it is really a content and value-added services play,” says Sridhar T Pai, head of market research consultancy Tonse Telecom.
“And it [3G] hasn’t been marketed like that by BSNL.”
“I’m a BSNL customer and I haven’t been approached about any new offerings post the introduction of 3G services. Apart from movies and music, there are other services like video streaming, enterprise 3G and mobile broadband services they can introduce.
But they haven’t. And there hasn’t been an attempt to market the benefits of 3G even to existing customers,” points out Sridhar.
While it has an unparalleled network and resources, BSNL’s “assets are under-monetized,” says Sridhar. “State-run organizations globally at some point change in terms of the work culture, energy, people autonomy etc to become effective corporate structures.
But that hasn’t happened with BSNL.”