Sky Pro voice, data service to go nationwide by Oct

NEPAL Telecom (NT) has stated that its Sky Pro service will be available in all the 75 districts by the Dashain festival in October. The IP CDMA technology-based service, also known as EVDO, offers both voice and data service with speeds of up to 3.1 Mbps. Launched three months ago, Sky Pro is presently available in the district headquarters and business centres of 45 districts. NT started distributing Sky Pro RUIM cards to customers in Gandaki zone on Wednesday. The card is bundled with the USB dongle required to connect computers to the data service. Distribution started in Dhaulagiri zone on Thursday. NT's charge for the package is Rs 2,359 for which customers get a RUIM card, dongle with 1 GB memory, talk time worth Rs 100 and 5 GB of data service. The data service costs 50 paisa per MB. Sky Pro will be available in Manang and Mustang districts in the Himalayan region soon. NT spokesperson Guna Keshari Pradhan said they were installing equipment to enable the IP CDMA network to cover all the districts to operate the Sky Pro service. "CDMA service is already available in all the districts, and EVDO is an upgraded data service using IP CDMA technology," she added. NT claimed that even in areas where the IP CDMA signal is weak, customers can get a minimum speed of 153.6 Kbps. As per the recently unveiled annual plan of the company, Sky Pro service will also help it to extend its high speed wireless data service to rural areas. Sky Pro is being provided under the company's 2 million IP CDMA lines project. NT signed a US$ 30 million contract with Chinese telecommunications vendor Huawei Technologies in August 2011 to implement the IP CDMA project. In the current fiscal year, the company has set a target to distribute 886,000 Sky Pro lines across the country. Pradhan said that the company was also preparing to distribute RUIM cards bundled with IP-CDMA enabled smartphones. "An agreement to this effect will be signed soon with the concerned distributors," she added. Local authorised distributors of Alcatel, Lenovo and Miramax had proposed to NT to supply smartphones. The RUIM card requires a smartphone that supports voice and data service in the IP CDMA network. NT officials said that the handsets would cost in the range of Rs 10,000 to Rs 20,000. They said that the company had to bundle the RUIM card with the smartphone as IP CDMA-technology compatible cell phones were hard to come by in Nepal as the local telecom service is dominated by the GSM system.