Southern States - Tamil Nadu

BSNL mobile phone service by May

By Our Staff Reporter

MADURAI APRIL 21. Customers in Madurai, Coimbatore and Tirupur are expected to have the benefit of mobile phone service from the Bharat Sanchar Nigam Limited by May. This service will be expanded to 68 towns in the Tamil Nadu Telecom Circle by August.

Addressing newspersons after inaugurating a 3000-line telephone exchange at Teppakulam here today, the Chief General Manager, BSNL, Tamil Nadu Circle, T. S. Vasudevan, said soft-testing of mobile services in the three towns would start shortly. The commercial services with an initial 15,000 connections would begin by May. The installation of exchanges in 68 towns with an equipped capacity of 1.30 lakh connections would be completed by June and the services expanded by August.

Mr. Vasudevan said the brand name and tariff were yet to be fixed. The BSNL would give an uninterrupted mobile service throughout the national highways. Similarly, roaming services among the four southern States were likely to be started by December.

On the launch of wireless in local loop (WLL) services, he said 3,000 connections would be given by next month in Vellore, Chengalpattu, Cuddalore and Tiruchi. Mr. Vasudevan said that the BSNL was preparing itself to face the competition from the three private players and admitted that lack of a proper public grievance redressal mechanism was its weak point.

The BSNL added 115 new exchanges last year in the Tamil Nadu Circle and increased the equipped capacity by 4.41 lakh connections. The equipped capacity of trunk automatic exchanges were also increased by an additional 1.16 lakh lines, to provide interconnectivity among the private players and the BSNL, he said.

A total of 3.02 lakh new connections were given last year and almost 1800 out of the total 1976 exchanges in the circle had been connected with optic fibre cables.

Around 20,000 connections were withdrawn last year since the Union Finance Ministry had made possession of telephone connection one of the six mandatory conditions to file income tax returns. Earlier, speaking at the inauguration of 150th exchange in the Madurai telecom district, Mr. Vasudevan urged the BSNL employees to improve fault-rectifying services and added that the sustenance of the organisation depended on the customers.

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