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Tell us about your department’s activities?
We are responsible for fixing tariff and interacting with the
regulator. We also take care of introduction of new services. Presently, we are
in the process of introducing cellular services across the country. Besides
this, we are also monitoring Internet services. As far as limited mobility is
concerned, we treat it as an extension of basic services.
What is the status of cellular services rollout and why
has it been delayed?
We embarked upon the process of undertaking pilot projects in
twenty-seven cities with a few hundred lines. Tenders have already been floated
and APOs have been issued for three zones. The process of tendering for the east
zone is on. We have plans for 1,021 cities apart from the cities where pilot is
going on. We are going to start cellular services in Kolkata from November, the
testing for which is going on. This will be followed by Jamshedpur and Ranchi.
What is the status of Internet services?
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We started off with the building of National Internet
Backbone (NIB) 1 with 107 nodes. In the meantime, it was announced that every
district headquarter will have one node. Plans were modified a bit, and VSNL was
roped in to help us out in the project. NIB 1 became over loaded and so NIB II
was planned to complement that. Due to some problems, the project got stuck up.
We are in the process of reworking NIB II, to include other services in the
changed scenario. Currently, we have about 25,000 subscribers who are partially
on VSNL servers.
How are you going to improve your QoS and customer care?
We are working hard to improve the quality of services. We
have appointed account managers in every circle, to personally take charge of
our esteemed customers, especially the corporates. We have also set up seven
contact centers and have plans to set up more. To reach out to corporates, we
have set up business development units in some circles, and we are taking fiber
to the building.