Reliance Communications today announced various initiatives to increase mobile telecom and internet penetration in rural India,  with the launch of three new initiatives known as “BharatNet” plan, “Grameen VAS” and “M2M” (Machine to Machine) solutions for rural customers.

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Mr S P Shukla, President Wireless, Reliance Communications quoted “The Indian telecom wireless rural subscriber base is now over 125 million. The next wave of telecom growth is emerging from rural India. With rural base expected to double in the next few years, RCOM is committed to drive this exponential growth through innovative and ground breaking service offerings and tariffs.
BharatNet Plan: RCOM’s strategy to drive rural internet penetration. Today, there is an existing addressable market base of around 4 million PC users in rural India.

However these users are faced with an inherent limitation of dial-up services on quality, speed and an effective broadband service, which are currently available only to urban territories. To address this clear need, RCOM is launching “BharatNet plan”, the high-speed wireless internet service in over 20,000 rural locations across the country.

This will be a high-speed variant of its Reliance NetConnect service, but specifically designed for the rural and sub-urban markets offering speeds of approximately 153 Kbps, which is 4 to 8 times the current dial-up speed of the wire-line services. Additionally, speed quality will improve, since it is no longer dependent on the quality of the copper wire.

As part of this, RCOM is offering “BharatNet” internet access for just Rs 98/week with downloads upto 350MB. With this sachet pricing, RCOM plans to create appeal with both, casual and heavy users. This tariff will be available across rural India excluding the metros and top 100 cities. “Driving Internet penetration across the country beyond major cities is a key priority for Reliance Communications,” said Mr. Prasad.