Villages to be provided satellite telephones

Imphal, Oct 2: The BSNL, Imphal, under Bharat Nirman programme will provide public telephones to all villages with population of more than 100 with digital satellite public telephone (DSPT).

The North East-Il Telecom Circle with headquarters at Dimapur which looks after Manipur, Nagaland and Arunachal Pradesh will take up the task of helping villagers in the interior areas to have communication with the outside world.

BSNL officials said there are 55 electronic exchanges with total equipped capacity of 61800 lines and working lines of 47130 in Manipur and all the C-DOT Exchanges will be upgraded to the latest version, for which Hardware and Software have already been ordered.

Besides, there is a separate TAX (Trunk Auto Exchange) to connect the calls from and to outside the state. This year additional 5000 lines TAX capacity has been commissioned on August 31 taking total capacity of OCB Trunk Exchange to 10000 lines. This will greatly relieve any congestion for outside calls.

Officials said the WLL systems will be upgraded and have both prepaid and SMS service shortly. High speed data up to 144 kbps is possible in the MSC based WLL system.

The GSM mobile service which was launched during 2003 has now been expanded. A total of 51 BTS towers have been commissioned and another 2 BTS towers getting ready for commissioning shortly. As on date, Manipur SSA serves to 58962 mobile customers, out of which 18425 are Postpaid connections and 40537 are Prepaid connections. In the new mobile expansion Programme (Phase V) all towns/villages having population above 1000 will be covered. In the first part of phase V, towns with population more than 3000 shall be covered and the remaining towns and villages having population 1000 will be covered subsequently in second and third parts of Phase V.

All the National Highways will also be provided with seamless coverage during part II&III of the proposed expansion. The part II&III of the proposed expansion will have 3G capabilities. The details of which will be finalized by the year end.

As part of customer care, a plan has been drawn to provide online receipt of bills in a number of District Headquarters in the State.

In addition payments through Post Office and Banks are also being strengthened.

Manipur SSA is planning to introduce value added service ''News On Phone (NOP)''. One primary rate access having 30 channel capacities has been provided to All India Radio. The service is likely to commence as soon as the content provider is ready. The service shall be available with access code 128500&125900 officials said.

UNI