CHENNAI: Bharat Sanchar Nigam Limited is confident of providing new landline phone connections on demand in most areas of Tamil Nadu by July.

The telecom corporation, its Tamil Nadu Circle Chief General Manager K. Sridhara said, was trying to clear the waiting list of nearly one lakh connections. Expressing confidence that it would be able to offer the connections on demand in most areas by July, he said it was possible in view of the availability of fixed wireless phones in sufficient numbers.

He was speaking at a function organised by the Chennai centre of Institution of Electronics and Telecommunication Engineers here on Wednesday to mark the first world information society day. The theme was `promoting global cyber security'.

Hinting that BSNL would provide wireless landlines towards overcoming the technical difficulties it faced in some areas, he said the number of WLL (wireless in local loop) phones to be provided this year would be one lakh.

The number of wired landline connections estimated to be given would be 30,000.

Broadband

On broadband service, Mr. Sridhara said the subscriber base would shortly increase from 19,000 in 24 cities to 30,000 in 63 cities. Further, equipment supplies were coming in to take the broadband subscriber base to 70,000 across in 400 locations.

Broadband's significance

Underscoring broadband's significance from the perspective of popularising tele-medicine, he said BSNL was evaluating the prospects of using the high-speed Internet connections to promote tele-education free of cost, particularly for 10th and 12th class students.

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