Kathmandu, February 4:

Shrish SJB Rana, state minister for information and communication, while speaking at the second anniversary programme of Nepal Telecom, announced that NT’s CDMA service would start from tomorrow.

While answering questions from journalists, he said mobile pre-paid services of Nepal Telecom and Spice Nepal have been shut down owing to security reasons.

Painting a picture of utter uncertainty, he said that the service could resume anytime or other telecommunication services could be closed anytime, depending upon the security situation of the country.

Earlier, addressing the programme, Rana said that a liberal policy adopted by the government has invited private participation in telecommunications, widening the reach of telecommunication services.

He also urged for strengthening the network services of NT so as to compete in the market.

Sugat Ratna Kansakar, managing director at NT, said that it is time for NT to evaluate its performance over the last 22 months since it became a company and do a strategic planning so that it could be more effective and efficient in terms of providing quality and reliable service to customers.

A competitive environment looms over the telecommunications sector as private organisations are working for widening their service network. Other players in the sector are aggressively marketing which should be met by effective marketing from NT in order to ensure that it does not lose its market share, Kansakar said. “We have to identify what would be the ‘worst case scenario’ in the next two years and work accordingly to minimise it,” he said.

NT should also work for value addition to services being provided to customers so that it would not lose its market hold, he said adding that at present 95 per cent of the total mobile users are NT customers.

He hoped that NT whould not lose more than 25 per cent of its customers to the private sector.

Lok Raj Sharma, director at Nepal Telecommunication Authority Training Centre, said that customers’ satisfaction should be the aim of NT. Kumar Prasad Poudel, secretary at the ministry of information and communication, underscored the need of strengthening NT’s services .