Nepal Telecom to spend Rs 45m on service upgrade

Nepal Telecom, the country´s telecom giant, is planning to invest Rs 45 million this in network expansion, addition of new cell phone and fixed line phones and enhancing the capacity of mobile and landline networks in the current fiscal.

The quasi-governmental company has set a target of distributing an additional 2.2 million mobile phones this year. It is also planning to increase the subscriber base of CDMA-based cell phone users by 400,000 and distribute 50,000 more copper-wire based landlines. With the subscription of all these lines, the customer base of NT is expected to touch seven million.

Till the last fiscal year, the total number of NT´s customers had reached 4.2 million, of which three million were cell phone subscribers, 718,000 were CDMA-based phone service users and 562,000 were landline users. With the distribution of all these services, NT had generated a net profit of Rs 9.97 billion last year, according to its unaudited balance sheet.

“Although I am not totally satisfied with the company´s performance last year I am happy with what we did and what we achieved,” Amar Nath Singh, chief of Nepal Telecom told journalists at a press meet on Friday. “I hope to focus more on reaching more of the rural areas and improving quality of our services this year.”

Many of the NT´s customers had complained about the service quality especially during the time when the country was experiencing power outage of up to 18 hours a day. In those days, one-third of NT´s base transceiver stations (BTSs) used to be down all the time. To counter such problems, NT is also mulling over increasing the backup capacity of base transceiver stations (BTSs) in 500 places by adding more batteries, using solar energy and diesel-fueled generators.

Concurrently, NT is also planning to enhance the capacity of GSM mobile phone network this year to 6.2 million. Likewise, the capacity of CDMA-based services and PSTN (fixed phone) service will be increased to 1.6 million and 830,000, respectively.

This year, NT is also planning to start ADSL-based internet service in 40 major cities outside Kathmandu Valley within the next six months and make this service available in all 75 districts within the end of this fiscal. It is also planning to increase the number of 3G mobile phone customers to 100,000.

Source: Republica