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Wednesday, June 6, 1973
EXPANSION OF TELEPHONE SERVICES
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A new telephone exchange will be opened next month at Yau Tong
and the one at Kwai Chung will be extended at the end of this year to relieve the critical shortage of telephone lines in these two areas.
The Acting Financial Secretary, the Hon. D.J.C. Jones, pointed out to Logislative Council members that almost 90,000 new telephone lines were installed in 1972 and the waiting list stood at about 38,000 at the end of
the yoar.
"The average waiting period works out at about five months," he said. "But neither the government nor the company are complacent about the present size of the waiting list," he added.
He explained that under section 24 of the Telephone Ordinance, the Telephone Company is required to provide service to an applicant within a reasonable time after his initial application.
To enable the Postmaster General to keep fully abreast of his responsibilities in the expansion of telephone and telecommunication services generally, additional professional engineering staff have recently been recruited to the Post Office, Mr. Jones said.
Putting the problem of delay in telephone installation in proper perspective, Mr. Jones said that the number of working lines had increased from 107,000 at the end of 1962 to 651,000 at the end of last year,
six-fold increase in 10 years.
a more than
In addition, the waiting list as a percentage of working lines in operation had fallen from 34 percent to less than 6 percent within the last 10 years, he said.
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