Ahead of the January 22 consecration of Lord Ram temple in Ayodhya, the Bharat Sanchar Nigam Limited (BSNL) has upgraded its mobile phone network in the temple town.
While BSNL has set up additional five cell phone towers in Ayodhya, five more will be installed before the grand ceremony, which will be attended by Prime Minister Narendra Modi and thousands of special invitees.
“We have set up three mobile phone towers at the Ram temple premises apart from one each at the Ayodhya international airport and railway station,” BSNL, Uttar Pradesh East Circle, chief general manager Rajesh Kumar Soni said here.
He said since tens of thousands of devotees are expected to visit Ayodhya on a daily basis following the Lord Ram temple consecration, BSNL was upgrading the mobile phone infrastructure in the temple town to provide seamless connectivity for voice and data services.
Moreover, the company is ramping up infrastructure along the expressways in UP as well as the remote pockets, which are considered unviable by private cell phone service providers.
Soni said BSNL had started receiving high speed 4G Base Transceiver Station (BTS) equipment for installation in the UP East Circle to rollout the much awaited 4G services from next month.
Meanwhile, BSNL will sign a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) with the UP government to network public spaces and utilities with high speed optical fibre network in 35,000 villages.
BTS connects mobile devices to the network. It sends and receives radio signals to mobile devices by converting them to digital signals.
Earlier, Tata Consultancy Services (TCS)-C-DOT consortium had won the contract to erect 4G towers pan-India for BSNL. BSNL will use a 4G core technology for the first time developed indigenously by C-DOT.
At present, BSNL has nearly two million mobile phone and 46,000 landline subscribers in UP East Circle.
Meanwhile, Paytm has signed a MoU with Ayodhya Nagar Nigam to facilitate mobile payments using the former’s platform and solutions.