The Hindu : Tamil Nadu News : 'BSNL will be top cellular service provider'

Online edition of India's National Newspaper
Monday, Jul 19, 2004

Tamil Nadu

Tamil Nadu

'BSNL will be top cellular service provider'

By Our Staff Reporter

COIMBATORE, JULY 18 The Bharat Sanchar Nigam Limited (BSNL) plans to increase its cellular service capacity to 16-lakh lines by the end of this fiscal. As a step towards this, efforts are on to increase the present capacity of 3.5 lakhs by another 2.85 lakhs by August-end, at a cost of Rs.250 crores.

The Principal General Manager (Operations), Chennai, T.S. Kuppuswamy, told presspersons here today that even before reaching the 16-lakh mark, the BSNL would become the number one cellular service provider in the Tamil Nadu Telecom Circle when it would touch the targeted figure of eight lakhs by September-end.

Stating that the BSNL was well prepared to meet the competition from private service providers, he said elaborate plans had been drawn up to improve coverage by adding more towers, from the existing 541 to 1,000 by the end of this fiscal. Already, 200 towers (included in the 541) were added over the last two months across the circle. There was special focus on improving coverage in tourism and pilgrimage centres.

As for basic telephony, there were plans to providing additional capacity of 1.2-lakh lines by this financial year-end. This would help in clearing the 65,000 waitlisted connections. An additional 1,100 km of optical fibre cable, costing Rs.55 crores, would be laid to ease congestion and ensure route reliability. Besides, 860 rural automatic exchanges would be upgraded at a cost of Rs.5.6 crores.

The BSNL also planned to upgrade its Direct Internet Access System (DIAS). While this provided broadband service at 128 kbps (kilobits per second) now, the expanded bandwidth under the Multi Protocol Label Switching (MPLS) would provide faster access at 256 kbps. This would facilitate faster access for interactive programmes such as teleconferencing, teleeducation and telemedicine.

The MPLS and Phase II of the National Internet Backbone service would provide bandwidth at 256 kbps and its multiples and this would help in obtaining faster access, he said. "Tamil Nadu will be the first State to try this out soon."

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