KATHMANDU, Jan 14: Subscribers of Nepal Telecom (NT) services long complaining about its poor services are set to face more problems yet. The state-owned telecommunication service provider on Wednesday warned subscribers to expect periods of ‘partial interruptions’. [break]
Citing prolonged power outages, NT has said it may not be able to continue services at different intervals during load-shedding hours. “We have been providing PSTN (land line), CDMA, GSM mobile and other services using batteries. But the recently increased period of load-shedding has left us unable to properly charge those batteries,” NT has said in its notice published in various newspapers.
Meanwhile, NT Spokesperson Surendra Prasad Thikey said that these were only ‘advance cautions’.
“There is only some probability of this happening in the case of the PSTN lines, as PSTN stations are based in NT’s own buildings where we also have a generator back-up,” he told myrepublica.com. “If that also fails, then we have battery back-ups.” He added that the effect on CDMA lines would also be nominal as the subscriber base itself was low.
The biggest ‘chances’ of interruptions would be felt in the GSM-based mobile service, as its Base Transreceiver Station (BTSs) are placed in private homes with no generator back-ups. “We have around 350 BTSs in the Kathmandu Valley which have a subscriber base of around 900,000 to 1,000,000. The towers have battery back-ups. But because of the protracted power cut, which is now 16 hours a day, we may not be able to fully charge these batteries,” Thikey said. According to him, the towers have battery back-ups that can provide electricity for between six to eight hours when fully-charged. These batteries need between four to eight hours to fully charge.
“We have found that around 20 to 22 towers have not been working full-time right now. When these towers are down, one tower has to do the work of two which may cause subscribers to not be able to always connect,” he said.
“NT is looking at two ways to potentially solve this problem. One would be to add higher capacity battery back-ups to those towers the NT monitoring teams have found to be facing the most problems. Meanwhile we are doing homework on if it would be possible to provide generators to charge these batteries,” Thikey said.
NT currently has a subscriber base of around 2,200,000 in Nepal for its Post-paid and Pre-paid GSM mobile service.
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