With a view to reach out to more customers, the National Stock Exchange (NSE) is gearing up to launch trading over mobile phones through nearly 800 registered brokers in early October, an NSE official said.

At present, only about 10-15 big brokers have the infrastructure to offer mobile trading and it comes at a very high cost.

"For the first time in India, NSE is taking steps towards facilitating nearly 800 members and their clients (total of 1.2 crore investors) to trade through the mobile infrastructure set up by NSE from early-October," the NSE official said, adding that NSE has 1,200 active brokers.

In early-October, the NSE will enable any registered broker or a client to trade from anywhere in the country through their mobile phones. Clients can place orders, view positions and trade from anywhere in the country, the official said.

Fifty brokers randomly picked by the NSE will start getting market data on their mobiles from September 6. The market data facility will be extended to all brokers and investors on their mobiles effective from September 13.

The data includes the best bid and ask prices of Nifty stocks, other stocks, derivatives and currencies.

Trading over mobile phones will be similar to Internet trading. It will be facilitated on the NOW software that NSE provides to its brokers free of cost. The market data will also be provided free on brokers' cellphones and later on investors' cellphones.

NSE has already modified its hardware to facilitate mobile trading. Brokers will be given a URL on their cell phones and to get access to the NSE data, they will have to put in a user id and password to verify their identity for the purpose of trading.

Once clients go through these formalities, they can look at prices and market data. The links will be just like they are for Internet trading. .

The NOW platform will be connected to the Internet National Exchange of India, which will be connected to the service providers. These, in turn, will be connected to cellphone towers and then to mobiles.

Connectivity for cellphones will be as fast as high-speed Internet through BSNL, Airtel and Tata, the official said.

The main advantage of mobile trading will be that anyone can also see market data at the same speed as brokers or registered clients.

The mobile trading offering was in line with NSE's philosophy of reaching out to people in smaller towns, semi- urban and rural areas without them having to spend any money on the infrastructure, he said.

People who have low-end phones with GPRS connections can also use this facility, which means that 99 per cent of mobile users will be covered.

Furthermore, if someone travels abroad and is a registered client with a broker, the client can trade directly with the exchange, even from a number that is different from the India number, because the client would be writing the user id and password.

However, the broker will have to provide the software to his client to facilitate mobile trading from his end.

Commenting on safety issues, the official said that safeguards have been built-in to ensure that the right people trade and messages are not tampered with. The identification will be done through the user id and password, the message integrity through end-to-end encryption so that others can not see the data and it can't be tampered with.

Furthermore, the data will not be stored on the mobile phones for long durations.