BSNL Rs. 149 Plan for New Customers Offers 30 Minutes of Free Calls Per Day and 300MB Data

State-owned telecom operator BSNL on Monday came out with a prepaid scheme under which new subscribers can make 30 minutes of free voice calls - local and STD - daily to any other network for a month, for Rs. 149. BSNL customers will also have an option to get similar free unlimited calls for three months by paying lumpsum amount of Rs. 439, BSNL said in a statement.

In addition to the free calls, customers will get 300MB of mobile data as part of the BSNL Rs. 439 offer and Rs. 149 offer. As a fair usage policy, the calls to other network are limited to 30 minutes per day.

"BSNL has always been a front-runner in providing better and economical services to all their customers and this is one of the many such endeavours. Customers are coming forward to get our service which has helped our company increase our market share by 1 percent since March 2015 even in these hyper competitive telecom services," BSNL Chairman and Managing Director Anupam Shrivastava said.

The BSNL Rs. 439 offer and Rs. 149 offer are available on pan-India basis starting January 24, 2017, for all new customers and those of other operators who want to port out their number and join BSNL under the mobile number portability, the company said.

These BSNL offers will be available through the operator's channel partners, that is, franchisee, retail distributors and also customer service centre, the statement added.

On Tuesday, BSNL launched three new prepaid offerings, including Rs. 26 tariff voucher that allows free local and STD voice calls on any network during 26-hour validity.

"We will bring out three offerings...The first one is a Special Tariff Voucher or STV 26, which offers unlimited free voice calls on any network when subscriber is in home circle during the 26-hour validity, while the other two offers provide 1.5 times and double the talktime, respectively," BSNL Chairman and Managing Director, Anupam Shrivastava, told PTI.

The STV26 would be available between January 25 and January 31.

The other two are top-ups aimed at the higher-end segment and will remain on offer till March 31, he pointed out.

The second offer 'Combo 2601' will offer 1.5 times the call value and the third one 'Combo 6801' will offer double the talk time.

Under the Combo 2601, the telecom PSU will offer Rs. 2,600 talktime in the main account along with Rs. 1,300 talktime in a secondary account. The talktime under the secondary account, which comes with a time limit of three months, will have to be exhausted first by the consumer.

The main account that will hold the full talktime of Rs. 2,600 has no time limit for usage.

The Combo 6801 offer, which works on the same principle, offers Rs. 6,800 in the main account and a similar amount in the consumers' secondary account, thus giving consumers double the talktime.

"This is the first-of-its-kind offer. We have implemented an Intelligent Network architecture which allows us to bring interesting offerings for our customers. The architecture enables us a better way to design flexible top-up and recharges," Shrivastava said.