More trouble ahead for mobile phone users in Delhi

New Delhi: Mobile phone users in the Capital may be in for some inconvenience in the coming days with the Municipal Corporation of Delhi (MCD) on Wednesday instructing its officials to speed up sealing of unauthorised cell phone towers.

MCD Commissioner K S Mehra directed Deputy Commissioners of the civic body's 12 Zones to take measures to seal 1,532 unauthorized cell phone towers operating in the city.

These cell phone towers have been issued notices and have not replied to the same.

The city has a total of 5,364 mobile towers out of which 2,952 are unauthorized. The MCD has so far issued show cause notices on 1,532 towers to cell companies besides sealing 226 in the past few days.

"I have instructed the Deputy Commissioners to expedite action against unauthorized towers. We had given them one month time to reply. The time is out," Mehra said.

The issue was raised today in the Standing Committee of the MCD which endorsed the sealing action.

The MCD wants cell companies to apply for putting up towers on buildings in the Capital.

According to the new policy cleared by the MCD, cell phone operators will now have to pay Rs three-five lakh to the civic body for installing a tower. Presently, cell companies have to pay Rs one lakh in this regard.

These new rated will apply to legal towers when they apply for renewal as well.

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Facebook beats Google for visitors: Tracker

Social-networking star Facebook surpassed Google to become the most visited website in the United States for the first time last week, industry analysts showed.

Facebook's homepage finished the week ending March 13 as the most visited site in the country, according to industry tracker Hitwise.

The "important milestone," as described by Hitwise director of research Heather Dougherty, came as Facebook enjoyed a massive 185 per cent increase in visits in the same period, compared to the same week in 2009.

By comparison, visits to search engine home Google.com increased only nine per cent in the same time - although the tracker does not include Google property sites such as the popular Gmail email service
, YouTube and Google Maps.

Taken together, Facebook.com and Google.com amounted to 14 per cent of the entire US Internet visits last week, Dougherty said.

Google has been positioning challenges in recent months to Facebook and the micro-blogging site Twitter by adding the social-networking feature Buzz to its Gmail service.

In what could signal an escalating battle between Facebook and Google, the leading social-networking service celebrated its sixth birthday earlier this year with changes including a new message inbox that echoes Gmail's format.

Facebook boasts some 400 million users while Gmail had 176 million unique visitors in December, according to tracking firm comScore.

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