BSNL to launch pre-paid recharge through SMS

Tiruchirapalli, Mar 31: The Tamil Nadu Telecom Circle of the Bharat Sanchar Nigam Limited (BSNL) would be shortly introducing a unique system of recharging pre-paid services through SMS without any constraint or delay.

Talking to mediapersons here today Tamil Nadu Circle Mobile Services General Manager L Kannan said the recharging process for the pre-paid customers would be entrusted to the BSNL franchisees.

Titled 'Channel Top Up Franchisees', the franchisees would just recharge the talk time on receipt of prescribed fees from the subscribers. With about 80 franchisees located across the state, the services would be extended on receipt of some advance money from the franchisees and out of which the franchisees would be debited as and when he recharges the demanded amount from the pre-paid customers, he added.

Prior to that, to reduce recharging congestion, BSNL would be introducing recharging facility to their Cell-One customers by means of SMS. Under this scheme, the customer would send an SMS reading the alphabets 'RC' followed by the secret code printed on the scratch card and send the SMS to 3733.

One BSNL customer can recharge the coupon of another customer also by sending SMS 'TRC' and then the mobile number, followed by the secret code on the scratch card purchased from BSNL counters.

On receipt of the message, the server located at the billing switch in Tiruchirapalli, covering the entire state, Chennai Circle and Kerala, would arrange for the recharge and convey back the message to the customer via SMS.

About the growing complaints over the inconvenience in recharging the account for the past ten days, Mr Kannan said, ''this has been due to a major glitch in the BSNL Cellular Recharge Server and efforts are on to rectify it''. In view of the 'technical snag', the expiry date of uninterrupted service had been extended by another 15 days, he added.

''Of the 20.67 lakhs BSNL customers in Tamil Nadu Circle, 17.61 lakh are in the pre-paid category and 3.06 lakh in the post-paid category'', he added.

The Tiruchirapalli Intelligent Network (INN) is covering six Secondary Switching Areas (SSAs) in Tamil Nadu Circle, Kerala and Chennai city with an installed capacity of 16 lakh connections.

The Ericson-Nortel combined INN based at Coimbatore with 40 lakh capacity, was catering to the four southern states, Union Territory of Puducherry and Chennai City Circle. Although, the loaded capacity of these two INNs were little over the installed capacity, the processor load or the number received on these INNs were very much below the limited levels, he added.

He said the company was in the process of installing Nortel high capacity versions to face the additional load and augmentation of the peak load at places like Salem, Erode and Dharmapuri. Due to this, the capacity augmentation at Salem and Tiruchirapalli would improve and further capacity additions were under consideration by placing orders for fresh Nortel equipments, he added.

They were planning to improve the quality of service by removing certain Base Terminal Stations (BTS) and redeploying them in Motorola areas. About 12 selected and isolated stations would be installed with the new BTSs and thereby BSNL was hopeful of improving the quality, he said.

After the arrival of the Siemens equipments, the facility in Madurai and Chennai would be commissioned in May 2007, he added.

UNI