H Sundaresan, Chief General Manager of Maharashtra Telecom Circle, told media persons after releasing 1999 Pune Telecom directory, that telecom department will also provide Internet service to all 31 districts in Maharashtra by January 26. The service is available in nine districts of Maharashtra at present. Sundaresan said the department had also undertakren an ambitious programme of connecting all the districts in Maharashtra by laying optic fiber line.

Stating that department would be laying 72,000 km optic fiber line within a year, Sundaresan said all the tehsils would also be connected with each other in the second phase of the project.

He said the facility of intelligent netwrok, which was available only in Pune, will be extended to Nashik and Solapur within three months.

Nirmal Swaroop, principal general manager of Pune Telecom said the department had installed capacity of 4.11 lakh lines with 3.81 lakh operative connections. He said the Pune Telecom had a waiting list of 49,224 consumers and had provided 65,400 new connections last year. Swaroop said Pune Telecom had earned a revenue of Rs 470 crore in the last financial year and 14 new exchanges were opened.

Swaroop said Pune Telecom had planned to add 1.89 lakh lines while new technologies would also be introduced at Maharashi Karve, Bhosari, Akurdi, Sangvi, Kothrud, Kondhwa, Baner, Vimannagar, Katraj and Market Yard in the coming days.

Ashok Mandore, managing director of Sesa Seat, said the directory would be available on Internet for the users. Mandore said the directory had been corrected upto May 1999 and had about 3.66 entries. Mandore said yellow pages in the directory had more than 37,000 entries.