Nepal Telecom- the Government owned telecom operator, which has started its network upgrade in Eastern Development region (EDR) has completed the mobile network upgrade work for the first phase in some cities of EDR. It is known that all of the existing ZTE sites in Biratnagar, Itahari and Dharan city have been completely swapped by Huawei Equipment. Both ZTE and Huawei are Chinese manufacturers for telecom equipment. ZTE equipment were running in Nepal Telecom for more than 8 years and it is being replaced by new Huawei base station that have new features and have high capacity than the older ones. This network upgrade or swap is performed as a part of the 10 Million GSM/ UMTS project which will continue to swap all the existing mobile towers with new equipment and add some more towers in all regions of the country. NT has already done the swapping in major areas of the country whereas works for replacement in some areas including Eastern, Mid Western and Far Western region still remains.
After the swap, it is known that customers have experienced much improvement in voice quality and internet speed (even with 2G). Though there were some problems in the voice call quality with the swap, they now tell that the issue is already solved and fine tuning with RF optimization work is going on. This is the second phase of the network upgrade and expansion from their biggest project (10 Million GSM project), replacing old ZTE BTS with Huawei one. The swap is being done for all other areas of the Eastern development region which is known to complete within a month period.
If you are in those cities, you can dial *9# to know your mobile number and confirm if you are in the new network ( as older network won’t give you any result). If you have any problem getting signal inside those cities, please reboot your mobile phone. If the problem persists, contact nearest Nepal Telecom office or even you can mention it here.
If you have any queries regarding the network quality there or any problem, please feel free to feedback in the comment box below.
