KATHMANDU, JAN 13 - Nepal Telecom has stated that it could award the contract for the supply of equipment required to install its planned next generation network to ZTE Corporation. 

"Nepal Telecom can award the contract based on ZTE's long experience in Nepal and evaluation of its equipment," said managing director Amar Nath Singh while addressing a press conference held to highlight the company's progress in the first five months of the current fiscal year.

Singh added that Nepal Telecom was discussing providing a satisfactory performance certificate to ZTE and the tender process for procuring its equipment. "We assure you that whatever decision we take will benefit the country," he said. The government-owned telecom giant has been facing criticism regarding the poor quality of its GSM and CDMA service with a call success rate of around 50 percent.

However, the company has claimed that its service has improved much after being upgraded. "As per our recent study, the call success rate has gone beyond 90 percent, and the call drop ratio is below 1 percent," said company spokesperson Surendra Prasad Thike.

He added that keeping in mind the drop in the quality of service during load-shedding hours, Nepal Telecom had installed power backup for up to 12 hours in various places of the Kathmandu Valley and that it was working to install solar energy at 200 locations across the country.   

According to the company, the number of its customers has reached 4.8 million including the 587,178 new subscribers it received during the first five months of the fiscal year. Nepal Telecom aims to have 7.5 million customers by the end of the fiscal year.

Among its subscribers, 3.4 million are GSM users. The company issued 519,269 GSM SIMs during the period under review. Likewise, the number of CDMA users has risen to 778,838 with 60,883 new subscribers.

However, compared to GSM and CDMA, there are few takers for its PSTN service. During the five-month period, the company distributed only 7,026 lines bringing the total number of PSTN connections to 569,188.

The number of subscribers to Nepal Telecom's internet service has also increased mainly because of a rise in ADSL connections. If there were 95,493 internet subscribers at the end of the previous fiscal year, there are now 172,808 including 28,346 ADSL customers. Its ADSL internet facility has spread to 24 districts.

"We have a total capacity of 100,000 plus ADSL connections, and we will be expanding the service to all 75 districts within the current fiscal year," said Thike. He added that after the launching of PSTN service in Jajarkot and Rukum on Jan. 8, 2009, Nepal Telecom's landline service covers all the districts making it easy to expand its ADSL internet service.

Posted on: 2010-01-13 09:51

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