The ambitious East West Optical Fiber Project, formally came into operation from Monday.

Secretary of the Ministry of Information and Communications Kumar Prasad Poudel and Indian ambassador to Nepal, Shiv Shankar Mukherjee jointly inaugurated the project amidst a function at Nepal Telecom office, Jawalakhel, on Monday.

According to officials of NT, after the completion of the project, the capacity of carrying trunk calls would be tripled and people would benefit with much more effective telephone lines.

East West Optical Fibre Project is part of 7th telecom project to provide an optical fibre backbone to the telecom information superhighway along the East-West Highway from Bhadrapur in the east to Nepalgunj in the West covering 79 stations en-route.

The project serves all major towns like Kathmandu, Biratnagar, Birgunj, Bharatpur, Bhairahawa, Butwal and Nepalgunj.

It provides essential telecommunication services and backbone for other secondary services like internet services, manufacturing, distribution and insurance.

All the stations have been commissioned with state-of-art equipment. The smallest capacity of equipment, the synchronous transport module (STM), has a capacity of 1,890 voice-channels while the highest capacity synchronous transport module (STM 16) equipment has a capacity of 30,000 voice-data channels.

70 percent of Nepal’s population has been connected through this network.

According to NT officials, a proposal for Phase II has already been submitted to the government of India for consideration.

Phase II proposes to connect the remaining portion of East West Highway like Lamahi-Kohalpur-Attria-Mahendranagar; Birtamod-Kakarbhitta; Butwal-Kaligandaki-Pokhara-Damauli-Kathmandu as the main route and includes some important spur routes.