Get ready for a fresh bout of drops in long distance tariffs. State owned telecom operator MTNL is ready to kick-start its own National Long Distance (NLD) network and has drawn out plans to get a bigger bang from every subscriber buck.

MTNL on Monday got a letter of intent from the government giving it the go-ahead for an NLD license. With license bagged, a strident MTNL is bargaining for unheard-of carriage rates from its bigger brother BSNL on long-distance routes.

In addition, MTNL has plans to keep BSNL out of the hugely profitable Delhi-Mumbai circuit, where it wants to use its own NLD network to provide services.

For the rest of the country, MTNL will stick with BSNL, but is negotiating for the lowest-ever call carriage rates.

On Monday, Department of Telecom (DoT) officials held meetings with BSNL and MTNL executives to get them to agree on a carriage charge that MTNL finds acceptable even after it has its own NLD license.

The target rate MTNL is asking for is 30 paise for every one-minute call, which is far less than the 65 paise a minute that BSNL currently gets as carriage charges. With such low rates, MTNL will be able to offer its customers calls at Re 1 per minute.

This Re 1 tariff, sources said, will only be valid when a MTNL customer calls another MTNL phone user. An added bonanza will be that MTNL will offer this Re 1 per minute tariff without increasing rentals (for landlines and mobiles both).

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