Kathmandu, October 11:

Nepal Telecom (NT), which has been facing public wrath of late for low quality mobile service, is upgrading its service in the country soon.

It is receiving the first lot of Base Trans-receiver Station (BTS) equipment this month.

It is to be delivered by Zte, a Chinese company, which bagged the tender for 35 lakh GSM Cellular Mobile lines in April.

The Zte had won the contract at $55 million ($15.71 per line).With the installation of the first lot (200 GSM tower), the Nepal Telecom is hoping to tremendously improve the quality of

the mobile service in the country.

“Since we are lacking in infrastructure, the new equipment will help in quality control,” Rabindra Jha, project manager, NT, told this daily.

Of late, the NT has received a lot of complaints regarding poor quality of service like sudden disconnection, congestion and cross-connection.

The NT officials agree that there are problems ‘mostly during peak hours.’

“We are importing equipment by keeping in mind the necessity and the growing demand till the year 2010,” Jha said, adding, “The machines available at present are not sufficient and that is why there is congestion and other problems in our service.”

Comparing NT’s service with that of Singapore, where mobile service is considered to be one of the best in the world, Jha said, “These are technical problems and they occur only occasionally. That happens everywhere, even in Washington DC.”

“NT is very aware of the congestion problem and it is taking quality control issue very seriously,” Surendra Thike, spokesperson for Nepal Telecom said.

He told THT that performance monitoring is a ‘continuous process’ that NT overtakes periodically.

The NT is purchasing switch, BSC, BTS, GTRS and other ancillary equipment.

As for the installation and commissioning part, the project requirement is 1005 sites for phase I, 516 for phase II and 524 for the third phase.

The document states that phase I is to be completed within ‘12 months’ once the contract is signed.

Meanwhile, the Nepal Telecom Mobile Service Directorate invited a tender for supply and delivery of two million SIM cards on October 9 to compensate for the lost or spoilt SIM cards.

It is said that over a lakh SIM cards are reported either lost or damaged in NT per year.