Date:03/04/2007 URL: http://www.thehindu.com/2007/04/03/stories/2007040319300500.htm

Tamil Nadu - Chennai

BSNL phone exchange upgrade in last lap

Dinesh Varma

Entire city will come under cover of new technology switches by June Entire city will come under new technology switches by June

MODERNISATION: The OCB exchange at the Anna Road Telephone Exchange. — Photo: K. Pichumani

CHENNAI : BSNL Chennai Telephones is into the last lap of upgrading its battery of exchanges across the city.

The E10B and FETEX switches that appeared state-of-the-art in the 1980s when digital replaced analog eventually proved to be communication technologies with a lisp compared to the superior versions of the following decade; the newer-generation switches could provide value-added features such as Integrated Switched Data Transmission (ISDN), Call Forwarding and I-net, a switched Public Data Network.

BSNL expects to upgrade in a couple of months some of the remaining old-generation E10B and FETEX exchanges that serve small segments of subscribers in areas such as RK Nagar, St. Thomas Mount and Anna Nagar. With this, the entire city will come under the cover of New Technology Switches such as OCB, AXE, EWSD and 5ESS.

What this will also mean is that the whole of Chennai will have a touch of French (OCB-Alcatel), Swedish (AXE-Ericsson) and German (EWSD-Siemens) to their everyday conversations. The 5ESS technology is from the stable of Lucent AT&T in the U.S.

Chennai Telephones chief general manager M. P. Velusamy said the scrapping of old-generation exchanges and introduction of new technologies was in the final phase in the city. BSNL expects by June to upgrade the whole network of exchanges in the city, he said.

BSNL officials said the capacity of the 333 exchanges in the city was currently more than enough to meet the demand of the subscriber base. Chennai Circle's current subscriber base for landlines is 9.82 lakh and growing at 0.52 per cent annually.

The tele-density for BSNL landlines is 17 per cent per 100 of population.

With the cumulative capacity of the landline infrastructure aggregating 14.31 lakh lines, the question of a jammed network does not arise unlike in the case of GSM network. Which is also why the capacity upgradation is focused on the mobile segment and broadband at present.

Chennai Telecom is currently engaged in a `reparenting exercise,' where a bunch of numbers are transferred to a proximate and modernised exchange.

Besides streamlining administration and maintenance, reparenting will also reduce the loop-length from a subscriber to his serving exchange, an official said.

Technical staff point out that most times, reparenting is done without the involvement of the subscriber, or in other words, without any change in the number. At some places, the numbers undergo a slight change and in these places the changed number announcement will be retained for a period of three months.