Telecommunication service was seen as vital for supporting the development works, and the first systematic approach to putting in place a telecommunications system in Bhutan was taken up only in 1963 with India‘s assistance. The responsibility to establish the first telecommunication system in Bhutan was given to the 41 Signal Task Force of the General Reserve Engineering Force (GREF) under Project DANTAK. They built three separate networks that were not interconnected. The network in Western Bhutan linked the capital Thimphu to Phuentsholing, the network in Central Bhutan connected Trongsa to Gelephu, and the eastern network connected Trashigang to SamdrupJongkhar. In 1970, the Royal Government of Bhutan established the Ministry of Communications with two departments: the Department of Telecommunications and the Department of Civil Wireless (HF radiocommunications). It was not until 1984 that Bhutan‘s first link with the outside world was established, with an analogue microwave link from Thimphu to Hasimara (India).After having deployed the basic infrastructures for telecommunications, the project DANTAK handed over telephone exchanges to the Royal Government of Bhutan in December 1984. On 2 June 1999, coinciding with the Silver Jubilee celebration of the golden reign of His Majesty the Fourth Druk Gyalpo, the then Department of Telecommunications introduced Internet services in Bhutan for the first time with assistance from the Inter-national Development Research Center (IDRC) of Canada. Also in 1999, the 77th National Assembly passed the Bhutan Telecommunications Act. Following this, the Department of Telecommunication was transformed into a wholly state-owned corporation called Bhutan Telecom Limited (BTL) in July 2000.Since then, BTL has continuously improved its operating efficiency, reduced prices, increased pe*******on, and improved its quality of service thus meeting the govern-ment‘s objective of corporatisation. In order to meet the growing needs of its customers, BTL successfully introduced the cellular mobile phone services for the first time in Bhutan in November 2003. Since then, the customer base for the cellular mobile services grew steadily to its present strength of over 2,50,000. As a wholly state-owned company, BTL is fully aware that its resources belong to each and every Bhutanese. In order to make prudent use of these resources, BTL continues to adapt to technological advancements - thorough adoption of efficient technologies that suit our market and environment. Over the last few years, BTL has not only up-graded its cellular mobile phone network and the Internet backbone, but also its fixed phone switches and transmission systems, thus maintaining its position as the industry leader in the country. The major challenges in providing telecom-munication services in Bhutan are its rugged terrain and sparsely populated villages sepa-rated by wide geographical distances. Yet today, BTL continues to meet both the com-mercial and the social aspects of its opera-tions by expanding its network coverage to even extremely thinly populated remote places like Laya and Lingshi, and continu-ing to provide reliable services in such areas even though it is commercially non-viable.
