Now Reliance Infocomm Comes Up With Pbo

[Arun 795]

TIMES NEWS NETWORK[ SUNDAY, OCTOBER 10, 2004 12:49:01 AM ]

Reliance Infocomm Ltd is looking at the successful public call office (PCO) model for delivery of e-governance initiatives to the rural areas.

In the nextgen PCO, Reliance will use broad band to deliver the services, changing its ‘avatar’ to that of a public broad-band office (PBO).

Prakash Bajpai, president, Reliance Infocomm, said the G2C (government to consumer) initiative on e-governance will popularise the use of broad band. However, he did not have a time-frame for Reliance’s projected PBO nor the investments needed.

“The PBO will need applications like e-mail, transactions, filing of returns, sales tax or excise duty filing or any other work requiring government interaction. Additionally, we will have to persuade government for spectrum availability and dedicated carriers for data will be needed.

Investments will be needed for the creation of base stations, too,” Bajpai said. Meanwhile, pushing its broad band service offering, Reliance Infocomm will add another eight products to its existing 12. The new products, to be launched in another two months time, will include collaborative services and consumer Internet.

The bouquet of collaborative products will include audio, video and web conferencing services while the consumer ’Net offerings will include interactive games, health and education.

In an effort to improve its customer care services, the telecom services provider is set to launch Web World Express (WWE). These franchised outlets will initially attend to customer care issues and then expand to include broad band services.

“We are rolling out 1100 WWEs in the next few months. These will initially be customer care outlets and could be broad band connected depending on market demand,” Bajpai said.