Subscribers of Bharat Sanchar Nigam Ltd can start paying their telephone bills via Internet in the next few weeks, thereby bidding adieu to long queues.

The company is in talks with new private sector banks, few nationalised banks and credit card companies to offer both direct debit and credit card payment options to the subscribers.

The telecom major is already offering 'direct debit' payment facility to the customers of HDFC and UTI banks in the Andhra Pradesh circle for the first time in the country through its portal www.bsnl.in. It now plans to spread the facility to the customers of the two banks in other circles as well shortly.

The company has also just tied up with a third bank, Global Trust Bank for bill payments, which means subscribers of these banks can log onto the BSNL portal, provide instructions online to their bank and the bill amount is directly debited from their accounts.

"We do not want to burden our subscribers, who wish to pay their bills through credit cards by way of surcharges and transaction fee. We are negotiating with the credit card companies to lower the transaction fee," K A Ramayya, general manager (operations) of BSNL told Business Standard.

The experiment in the AP circle for the direct debit payment facility with HDFC and UTI banks is a success with more than Rs 1.5 lakh (Rs 150,000) per month being collected through our portal, Ramayya said.

It can be recalled that the AP circle of BSNL has developed and is maintaining the portal for all the circles in the country on a centralised basis.

The portal, which was launched in August last year has had 11 million hits in the past six months and there about 13,000 registered users across the country availing the information and payment services.

The portal, in addition to the regular features like providing links to respective BSNL circles' web sites, also offers an internal e-mail system for the employees of the organisation.

Intelligroup Asia, a city based IT solutions major is looking after the maintenance and content development for the portal.

"We are planning to start selling India Telephone Cards and sale and renewal of Internet connections through our portal shortly," Ramayya said.

Currently the company follows a system of selling Internet connections, where customers are required to take a demand draft first, submit it to the organisation - which will activate the account within 24 hours.

BSNL is planning to do away with the system and start providing CD to the subscribers for providing instant connection. Plans are also afoot to provide more value added services like applying for a phone connection online, phone shift request online etc, through the portal.