MANGALORE: Plans of the State-owned Bharat Sanchar Nigam Ltd. (BSNL) to further roll out its Global System for Mobile communications (GSM) services across India is six months behind schedule. BSNL had planned to provide an additional six crore GSM connections and had called tenders for equipment to give 4.55 crore new connections six months ago. However, nothing much has happened since then in this regard.

T.N. Sudhindra Kumar, Principal General Manager, Dakshina Kannada telecom district of BSNL told The Hindu here on Thursday that one of the equipment suppliers had gone to court on technical grounds. BSNL had called tenders in September last for equipment to facilitate an addition of 4.55 crore new connections across India, including nearly 30 lakh connections in Karnataka Telecom circle, he said.

Under the proposed expansion plan of its GSM services, BSNL was to set up an additional 150 base transceiver stations in Dakshina Kannada telecom district. This would have complemented 280-odd such stations functioning in the telecom district, he said. While BSNL had ensured last-mile connectivity with its existing transceiver stations in the district, the coverage would be better once the new BTSs were set up, Mr. Kumar said.

To compensate for the loss of time, Mr. Kumar said he had proposed to the planning wing at Bangalore that the local staff would involve themselves in installation and commissioning of base transceiver stations after receiving the equipment.

This was normally done by the company supplying the equipment under the supervision of the planning wing, he said. According to the guidelines issued by BSNL head office, the telecom districts are supposed to set up one BTS to cover a village with a population of 5,000 people. However, in the telecom district, the existing stations have covered villages with a population of 1,000 people, Mr. Kumar added.

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