A senior NT official told myrepublica.com that the state-owned telecom service provider is looking into alternative sources to power its Base Transceiver Stations (BTSs) and a solution will be revealed next week. NT has been blaming the ever-increasing power-cuts, which hit 20 hours a day last week, for its deteriorating GSM service.
“It’s high time we improved our quality of service. Since the electricity supplier is itself powerless, and it looks like it cannot do anything about it until the rainy season, we have been forced to look at powering up our BTSs ourselves,” Rabindra Jha, manager of NT’s Mobile Service Directorate, told myrepublica.com. “Sixty-three BTSs in Kathmandu Valley were down on Monday, while it was 48 on Tuesday, 21 on Wednesday, and 47 on Thursday,” he added.
Jha said a high-level committee is evaluating a bid to use solar panels to power up BTSs in important sectors, and it is also considering plans to establish mobile generator teams that will rush generators to troubled BTSs when hit by power cuts.
“We are looking at providing these to 100 areas in the first phase. In this phase we will give priority to essential areas like hospitals and large offices,” Jha said.
NT has received a bid for solar panel installation at 50 locations and two bids for generators, according to another NT official. He said the cost effectiveness of the generators was being evaluated. The selected bidder will have to establish mobile teams which will go to areas where the BTSs are running out of power and power them up for the period of power cut in the area. “The committee will also see if it would be cheaper to buy the generators and have its own team,” he said.
The quality of service of NT’s GSM network has come under heavy criticism lately, with NT maintaining that power cuts are squarely to blame. NT has around 325 BTSs in the Valley and a subscriber base of more than 900,000 for its Post-paid and Pre-paid GSM services here. The BTSs, mostly installed on the rooftops of privately-owned houses, have power back-ups of between six and eight hours. The back-ups themselves need four to eight hours to fully charge.
“The afternoon power-cut schedule of 8 am to 4 pm has been causing the most problems, with batteries running out at around 2 pm,” Jha said, elaborating that once the BTSs run out of power the remaining ones have to bear the brunt of all the subscribers in the area. “So one BTS has to do the work of four. And this is also the busiest time of day.”
He said NT has a network capacity for handling 400,000 more lines in the Valley. “But because of the power situation we cannot add more subscribers now.”
NT currently has around 850 BTSs and a subscriber base of around 2,200,000 in Nepal for its Post-paid and Pre-paid GSM mobile service.
Meanwhile, Nepal Telecom Authority (NTA), the telecom regulatory body, called representatives of service providers NT, Spice Nepal and United Telecom Limited (UTL) Friday to ask them to clarify why their quality of services was below par. According to NTA, representatives of both NT and UTL said that their service would improve by the end of next week. No one from Spice Nepal showed up.
tapas@myrepublica.com
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