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Pre-paid cards hit CalTel speedbreakBy Rajesh Kumar, Section Telephone
The Excel subscriber base in the city has hit a Calcutta Telephones "speed-breaker".
Despite the steady demand for the pre-paid mobile telephone service of BSNL, CalTel customer centres have not been providing new connections. Recharge coupons, too, are scarce. "We cannot say for sure when the new Excel SIM cards will arrive," a senior CalTel official said on Sunday. Officials fear the situation could further worsen when BSNL announces a Holi festival offer of full talk-time on recharge. CalTel sources said a lack of adequate base transmission stations and radio-handling capacity were the main reasons for imposing a "speed breaker" on Excel sales. The subscriber base of BSNL's mobile telephone service, CellOne, jumped from a mere 26,000 on May 12, when it was relaunched, to more than 2.5 lakh. Among them, around 2.21 lakh are Excel subscribers. Against 2.5 lakh customers, CalTel's switching capacity can cater to 2.76 lakh customers. Despite this, subscribers often complain of congestion problems. "With possible speech channels not being ready, the congestion problem has intensified," an official said.
As for base transmission stations, 170 are functioning and 77 are waiting to be commissioned.
The authorities are facing problems in setting up transmission towers. "Several municipal bodies are not giving permission for setting up towers. The reasons range from safety to objections raised by landlords. Once the towers are installed, CalTel can further expand its subscriber base," the official said. The demand for Excel, high since its launch, went up by several times with the unification of CalTel and West Bengal Telecom Circle on August 15, 2004. A sizeable number of customers are from the neighbouring West Bengal Telecom (WBT) area. In the WBT area, CellOne was launched more than two years ago and has around 300,000 subscribers. A staggering 2.5 lakh applicants are on the waiting list. Many of them have procured SIM cards from CalTel and are using them in the WBT area, adding to the network congestion problem. "More than 40,000 WBT subscribers have obtained their SIM cards from CalTel," the official said. "They have used local references for getting the connections."
The promise, however, is to improve things soon. "CalTel will augment its capacity in four phases by adding six lakh switching network," the official added.
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