The Bharat Sanchar Nigam Limited would soon establish Wi-Fi hotspots in Karur and Pudukottai bus stands and other public places in the Tiruchi telecom district comprising the five districts of Tiruchi, Karur, Perambalur, Ariyalur and Pudukottai.
Disclosing this at a press conference here on Tuesday, V.Raju, Principal General Manager, BSNL, Tiruchi, pointed out that a Wi-Fi hotspot has already been established at the Tiruchi Airport. The BSNL has planned to set up hotspots at more locations such as places of worship and other places of public congregation. The Wi-Fi hotspots at Karur and Pudukottai bus stands would become functional soon. Users would get free Internet access for the initial 15 minutes and would have to pay a nominal fee for further usage.
Mr.Raju said that the BSNL was expanding its mobile network in a big way by augmenting its infrastructure and replacing existing equipment with modern ones even while promoting use of landlines. Apart from substantial increase in capacity augmentation, the expansion would also bring about improvement in the quality of services.
He claimed that the number of subscribers migrating to the BSNL network through mobile number portability was higher than those who had migrated out of its network during the past one year. This was an indication of the improvement in the quality of service.
The Tiruchi telecom district stood third in the country, behind Hyderabad and Bengaluru, in terms of sale of SIM cards between August 1 and 20. BSNL has sold over 20,000 SIM cards during the period, including 10,000 cards sold on a single day on August 10 when mega melas were conducted across the telecom district.
Elaborating on the expansion and modernisation initiatives, Mr.Raju said advanced equipment are being installed in 261 2G base tower stations and the work has already been completed in 244 towers. Similarly, 3G equipment are being installed at 166 locations where they were not available so far.
With the improvement of broadband nodes, the minimum Internet speed has been increased to 1 Mbps from 512 Kbps. BSNL would soon provide Fibre-to-The-Home (FTTH) service to big apartments, malls and commercial complexes through optical fibre links for providing high speed data connections.
The BSNL was also promoting usage of landlines and since Independence Day landline customers have been offered unlimited free calls to any landline or mobile numbers of any network on Sundays. Already, unlimited free calls have been offered during night hours from 9 p.m. to 7 a.m. every day. New landline connections were also being provided for a monthly rental of just Rs.49 for six months and installation fee has been waived under the offer.
