Bangalore Telecom to start Net services in April

BANGALORE: The Department of Telecom will start offering Internet services from April in Bangalore city. It will be the first city in the country where DoT will begin its Internet services in a full fledged manner. It has been providing Internet access in a limited way in a few cities.

According to DoT general manager (development) B.P.S. Pai, Bangalore Telecom District was currently in the process of installing a 34 MB pipe from VSNL and a node with gateway facility. It will have the capability to connect to international gateway of our own whenever we decide to have one, he added. Depending on the demand, the bandwidth would be increased.

Mr Pai said that by the end of 2000, all district headquarters of Karnataka would have an Internet node. The connectivity will be provided either on digital microwave or fibre optic. On the tariff for Internet access, Mr Pai said that various aspects are being considered and a decision will have to be taken by the DoT in Delhi, as the tariff has to be the same across all cities in the country, irrespective of the potential demands.

The department will also complete the installation of Asynchronous Transfer Mode (ATM) switch. The ATM network will be ready for testing in April, Mr Pai said. It will allow corporates to connect to their main servers without the hassles of bandwidth limitations. The network, carrying a capacity of 140MB, will link the four metros to Bangalore. It will be ready for induction into the network in three months time.

Mr Pai said that in a month’s time, some of the other intelligent services such as account card calling would be introduced in the city. In another development, Bangalore Telecom District is setting up a Synchronous Digital Hierarchy (SDH) ring of Synchronous Transport Module at a rate of 2.5 Gigabit per second across its exchanges. In the first phase, about 20 exchanges will be covered. This is ensure that when a fibre optic link is down for some reason between two exchanges, data will automatically get transmitted through the reverse route.