After Airtel and Jio, state run BSNL is all set to enter the voice bundled feature phone market with local mobile handset company Micromax to ma­tch competition and retain and add subscribers.

“We are tying up with Micromax for feature phone”, CMD of Bharat Sanchar, Anupam Shrivastava, said on Monday after the PSU announced the launch of a GST-enabled app service.

The phone, christened BharatOne – to lend a patriotic flavour to attract more customers - will be an entry level 4G VoLTE feature phone and will be launched on Tuesday.

The Micromax Bharat One will be bundled with features like free voice calls, but with BSNL offering only 3G service, the utility of a 4G VoLTE feature phone will be interesting to watch. The Airtel 4G VoLTE phone along with Karbon supports 4G and 3G services.

The bundling space in telecom has been activated after Jio launched its own branded feature phone along with Rs 153 tariff plan with a deposit of Rs 1,500, which will be refunded after a three-year lock-in period.

It was followed by Airtel tying up with a local brand Karbon for 4G smartphone to take on Reliance Jio feature phone for an effective price of Rs 1,399, bundled with a monthly pack of Rs 169 from Airtel.

For the Karbonn phone, a buyer needs to make a down payment of Rs 2,899 for the 4G smartphone and make 36 continuous monthly rec­harges of Rs 169. The customer will get a cash refund of Rs 500 after 18 months and another Rs 1,000 after 36 months, taking the total cash benefit to Rs 1,500.

The handset would be priced between Rs 1,400-Rs 1,500 and the tariff would be lower than the two already-launched tariff plans of Jio and Airtel, said a source.

The PSU will also tie up on Tuesday with two e-education portals for app based services –Probhitplus – an online education company and Extramarks, another company in the same space for increasing revenue flows from education verticals.

The carrier, which has survived cut-throat competition on the back of competitive tariffs on Monday, also said that it has passed on the benefits of the interconnection usage charges (IUC) cut to the customers in the form of lower tariffs.

Lower IUC rates are expected to bring down tariffs further. “We have passed on the benefits of lower IUC of 6 paise to the customers “, Shrivastava added.

The PSU’s annual IUC income has nearly halved to Rs 160 crore from Rs 300 crore, but it is on the look out of new verticals to compensate revenue shortfall. 

Meanwhile, BSNL in par­t­nership with SISL Infotech, has launched GSP/ASP ser­v­ice on Monday on a pan-In­dia basis to assist small and medium enterprises, as well as large business houses in transitioning to GST by lau­n­ching an application software, which will record invoices on a PC/hand held de­­v­ice or a smartphone alo­ng with GST compliances.

These will include preparation of GST returns, assistance in generation of GST challans for payment, filing of GST returns and sending back mismatch invoices. The application software for GST returns filing and compliances has been so desig­ned that even a small businessman with little IT skills can ensure GST compliances on their own.