Bharat Sanchar Nigam Limited(BSNL) in Anantapur district lost 200 of its employees on February 1 when they decided to take voluntary retirement accepting the offer given by the telecom giant. Now, BSNL is eagerly waiting for the finalisation of outsourcing of the maintenance of last-mile section through external agencies.
While the BSNL is going the extra-mile to maintain its services - both landline and cellular with existing staff, it expects to get the new agencies to take up the Pillar to Sub-office portion maintenance after doing the fault analysis and resolving it within the shortest possible time. Saturday is the last day for bidding the contracts, which have been floated with an upset price of ₹35 per connection and the lowest bidder gets the contract.
Entire district has 540 cellular towers at 345 locations and their maintenance has also become a herculean task with shortage of staff. The BSNL Senior General Manager Y. Siva Sankar Reddy told The Hindu that tenders have been called for the maintenance of the Base Transceiver Stations (BTS).
4G cellular services
“These tenders are likely to be finalised by February-end and new agencies might start working from the first week of March to share the burden of the BSNL staff, especially at the lower / ground level,” he said.
While the BSNL does not support 4G cellular services, if the government takes the decision, 135 of the existing cell towers are capable of supporting 4G services in the district. District has been divided into five zones depending on the density of telecom subscribers and tenders have been called for maintenance of towers based on the need.
Out of the 20 Customer Service Centres all over the district only 15 are functional now and manpower is being awaited to make the others also operational at the earliest. In many of the 15 CSCs only one person is handling all the requests.
The Fibre To Home internet connections in Anantapur are slowly growing and 1,700 people have opted for it compared to 11,329 of the slower broadband connection through copper cable. Two other private internet service providers also offer Fibre To Home internet connections in Anantapur city by taking the bandwidth from the BSNL. Landline telephone connections currently stand a little over 25,000 in the entire district.
