IMPHAL, October 6: Bharat Sanchar Nigam Limited (BSNL), the only State run telecom service provider of the country is all set to give better service to the public of Manipur in a bid to compete with other private companies.
General Manager Telecom District, Manipur Secondary Switching Areas (SSA) J Lunkim while addressing the media in a press briefing on account of `BSNL Week`™ observation at the conference hall of Telephone Bhawan today, said that a lot of misunderstanding and misconception has clouded the minds of the general public of various benefits and services provided by BSNL.
He said that even though the service has improved to such an extent that BSNL is now capable of competing with other private sector telecom service providers, people are very much reluctant to opt for it.
There are many factors and one of the reasons is that people are not so aware of the benefits of BSNL, he said.
BSNL works under the guidelines set by the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI), and which has tightened its hands against aggressive marketing strategies and yet BSNL works to provide the best service at much cheaper price, he added.
Other telecom service providers are profit seekers but BSNL is to control the cost of telecom, he asserted.
As part of observation a Consumer Education Workshop was also conducted where the Assistant Director (Sales) Ch Jiten presented various topics on consumer education and on the new Base Transceiver Stations (BTS) radiation plans and special initiatives taken up by SSA.
He addressed the consumers who took part in the workshop about various benefits provided under the BSNL, NE-II circle.
In the entire State, there are 11 customer care services centres where any consumer can address their grievances. The total tower count (radiated sites) in Manipur is 201 where the 2G BTS has 206 towers and 3G BTS has 106 towers and the total BTS towers is 307.
He stated that Manipur now has four Synchronous Transport Modules (STM) and they have been demanding for 16 STM from Power Grid Corporation of India, soon Manipur will have better internet and other facilities from BSNL, he added.
Further he said that importance of transmission stability is a must for smooth service and the main connectivity of BSNL is through Optical Fibre Cable which gets damaged from frequent landslides and other natural calamities.
To attract more customers BSNL has launched a new move of providing free calls from landline to any other network within the time frame of 9:00 pm to 7:00 am.
Altogether there are more than 18,000 landline users and over 2, 00,000 BSNL mobile phone users in the State.