Modi Telstra, the cellular phone service provider for Calcutta, will increase its switching capacity to 75,000 lines by May-end from 25,000 lines to meet subscriber demand.
Equipment will be sourced from Nokia.Modi Telstra, which commissioned India's first cellular network in 1995, will also add 10 more base stations by the end of the year.
It has also chalked out plans to instal `micro cells', developed by Australia's public sector telecom giant Telstra, in and around the city to spruce up its existing network coverage.
The Calcutta cellular market showed encouraging growth last year and is likely to get a further boost from this year's budget.
"We are getting between 1,200 and 1,300 subscribers a month and hope to have around 20,000 subscribers by July," said the company's chief executive officer Simon Beresford-Wylie. A Telstra technical team from Australia will visit the city next month to study ways to skew up network operations, he said.
Modi Telstra is in talks with the German firm LHS to import its BSCS (version 4) software which will enable it to introduce a wide range of need-based value added services in the coming months including innovative tariff packaging and advanced billing system.
Telstra's rev-up operations and equipment and software upgradation is aimed at availing the new common channel signalling system (CCS7) likely to be introduced by the department of telecommunications (DoT) in a few months.
At present, DoT is using CCS7 for its internal operations.
The advanced signalling system, based on channel associated signal, will enable cellular operators to offer additional services via subsequent dialling after a call is put through. A major feature would be that traffic channel would be loaded only when the channel will be through thus saving air time. It will also speed up call setup time and improve traffic handling efficiency at the junctions.
