Advice and Assistance to Government Departments
85. Planning and installing of Public Address Systems for a number of schools was undertaken for the Education Department and for a number of centres for the Social Welfare Department.
86. Assistance and supervision was provided to the Fire Services Department on the re-siting of the repeater stations of their V.H.F. radio system.
Telephones
87. Internal telephone service is provided by Hong Kong Telephone Company, Limited, a Public Company, registered in Hong Kong, and operating under a franchise from the Hong Kong Government.
88. Radio telephone service is available to most parts of the world in conjunction with Cable & Wireless Limited.
89. The system is fully automatic and service is provided from thirteen major exchanges together with a number of satellite exchanges. At 31st March, 1966 there were 270,003 telephones in service, an increase of 38,328 over the March 1965 figure. It is estimated that the total number of telephones will be doubled over the next four years and the Company is planning accordingly.
90. A new exchange was opened at Tsim Sha Tsui during the year and this, together with a number of extensions to existing exchanges, resulted in additional exchange capacity of 50,000 lines being provided during the year.
Other Communications
91. The year 1965-66 ushered in a new cable era with the official opening of SEACOM Stage I (South East Asia Commonwealth Cable) on 31st March, 1965. Hong Kong was thus provided with very much improved telecommunication facilities with Singapore and Malaysia as a first step towards incorporation in the worldwide submarine tele- phone cable network.
92. SEACOM offers a large number of channels which can be used for telegraph, Telex, telephone, facsimile and voicecast purposes. Its superiority over wireless channels is seen particularly in the overseas telephone service. Because of the greater clarity of speech over SEACOM and the semi-automatic working introduced, the number of calls from
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