NT starts selling own mobile phone sets

Targeting the upcoming election, Nepal Telecom (NT) has started selling mobile sets with its own brand name from Wednesday. NT has tied up with Batsal Impex vendor of Alcatel and has introduced two different models Alcatel D260--feature phone and Alcatel D290--smartphone from its office at Sundhara. The phones will be available from all NT counters from Thursday onward. Anoop Ranjan Bhattarai, deputy managing director of NT said the phone is perfect for politicians, cadres of political parties, government officials, army, armed police force (APF) among others who are deployed for election in villages as CDMA service has best carpet coverage in terms of both voice and data and is available in all the districts. NT officials said that Election Commission and APF have also shown its interest in the phones for providing it to election officials and security personnel. NT is selling Alcatel D260 under its own brand name. The phone whose priced was earlier fixed at 5,500 is likely to cost around Rs 5,000 and customers buying the phone will get a RUIM card worth Rs 100 with talk value of same amount and Rs 200 talk time free for a year. NT is likely to provide special Tihar discount on the purchase of phone. Alcatel D290 is available at Rs 20,500 and customers will get a RUIM card worth Rs 100 with talk value of same amount and data worth Rs 500 free for a year. Bhattarai said that the company has bundled the phone with CDMA service in order to promote CDMA service which is much cheaper compared to GSM service. NT has stated that it will be bundling its services with other phones such as Alcatel 990 C, Lenovo A 600E, A765 E and A820E and Micromax EG 350 in the near future. Sudhan Lal Shrestha senior engineer at NT said that the company is waiting for commitment from Lenovo and Micromax to provide its phones. Lenovo has said that it will provide commitment before Tihar while Micromax is yet to respond. “Both the phones introduced on Wednesday are a dual SIM phones that supports CDMA and GSM. For data, the phones support 3G in case of CDMA while in case of GSM it supports 2G only,” said Shrestha. NT has introduced 500 units of Alcatel D260 and 200 units of Alcatel D290 in the first phase. NT is also planning to bundle its services with high end mobile phones and tablets in the near future targeting upper class customers. It is carrying out test to bring Huawei Ascend P6 --a phone that can compete with iPhone 5 and Samsung Galaxy S4.