BANGALORE, March 3: Spice Telecom has said that the three new towers now operational would substantially improve in-building coverage at Malleshwaram, Domlur and JC Road. "The extension targets those areas where we already have good on street coverage - but need to improve in-building coverage," said CEO Fergus Wilmer said.This is the first of many significant steps Spice plan to improve their cellular network and coverage. According to Vijayraghavan, general manager, to ease congestion between their network and Bangalore Telecom, Spice has doubled interconnect capacity to handle telecom traffic between the two. "The interconnect between a cellular network and the Public Switched Telephone Network (PSTN) is often a bottleneck", said Vijayraghavan. "Currently on Spice to Spice phones, we have a call success rate of 91 per cent.
However the PSTN call success rate is approximately 60 to 70 per cent, with the result that callers from land phones complained that they got a busy tone when calling a Spicephone". He added that increasing interconnect capacity would rectify this.
Since launching services in April last year, Spice has chalked up a subscriber base of over 20,000. Besides fine tuning existing sites and adding another 10 by June 98, Spice plans to extend their Main Switching Centre (MSC) to handle more traffic. The company is also planning to extend phone services to the whole of Karnataka, and to this effect have invested Rs 25 crore to build an optical fibre cable network in the state.
Copyright © 1998 Indian Express Newspapers (Bombay) Ltd.
