Southern States - Tamil Nadu

BSNL launches multiplexing facility

By Our Staff Reporter

Coimbatore June 4. The Bharat Sanchar Nigam (BSNL) will launch its cellular services in August, its Chairman and Managing Director, Prithipal Singh, announced here today. Talking to reporters after dedicating Dense Wavelength Division Multiplexing (DWDM) equipment, the first of its kind in the country, he said that the BSNL had earned Rs. 24,000 crores last year and the growth rate was around 20 per cent. It had decided to spend Rs. 14,000 crores on technological upgradation and for provision of 6.5 million new telephones including 2.5 million cellular telephones during the current year.

The call centres would come up in all the SSAs in a phased manner. Similarly, circle heads had been directed to provide free telephone answering service to all subscribers as a value addition.

It had been proposed to provide telephones to 70,000 villages by June. Satellite terminals would be used for extending telephones to 18,000 villages in remote areas.

With regard to the 2.5 million mobile telephones, he said that validation of equipment was underway and a minimum of 1000 cities would be brought under the network before this year end.

The BSNL mobile telephone network would cover all National Highways and National Rail Routes. Dismissing reports that the BSNL was entering very late, he pointed out that mobile telephony market was very big and the growth was expected to be around 5 million new connections per annum.

The BSNL was negotiating with the banks for accepting credit cards.

The DWDM, dedicated on Tuesday at a cost of Rs. 300 crores, was a part of the Sanchar Sagar III project.

This 20 Gbps DWDM link between Coimbatore - Tiruchi would handle 2.56 lakh calls simultaneously. This would enable the BSNL to provide any amount of bandwidth at any given time.

Thereafter BSNL would take up commissioning of 80 Gbps DWDM system covering 64 important cities all over the country involving a route length of 25,425 km.

T.S. Vasudevan, Chief General Manager (TN Circle), R.N. Srinivasan (CGM-Southern Telecom Region), Kranti Kumar (Director-Planning - BSNL), S. Ramaganapathy (Sr.Deputy Director General - Transmission), M. Ramachandran (CGM-Projects) were among those who spoke.

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