Jorhat, March 19: Altogether 500 SIM cards were issued to customers in the first phase of the Bharat Sanchar Nigam Limited (BSNL) CellOne mobile connection distribution here today.

Over 2,600 customers will be given SIM cards over five days in Jorhat town.

Senior telecom engineer Rajesh Choudhury said the SIM cards would be activated two days after they were distributed to the customers.

“We require at least a couple of days to activate the SIM cards,” Choudhury said.

The demand for mobile connections in this Upper Assam town is so high that a lottery had to be conducted to select the customers.

The lottery was conducted on Tuesday by the BSNL authorities in the presence of senior citizens and vice-chancellor of the Assam Agricultural University

“The response has been tremendous. I have been receiving over 50 calls per day from the time we announced that CellOne mobile services would be launched in Jorhat,” said Choudhury.

BSNL’s CellOne mobile service has already been launched in Dibrugarh, Sivasagar and Golaghat towns.

“We have also included Nazira because of the growing demand from the Oil and Natural Gas Corporation (ONGC) employees,” Choudhury said.

The telecom engineer said that by June, the customers, who had been deprived of CellOne connections in the first phase, would get connection.

The craze over mobile phones here has reached such heights that an event management company, Creative Concepts, has organised a mobile carnival from March 23 in which customers will get the opportunity to select handsets of their choice.

The carnival will be the first exclusive mobile-handset exhibition in Upper Assam.

Some of the big players in the mobile market— Samsung, LG, Panasonic and Nokia — are expected to set up stalls at the carnival.

There will be as many as 24 stalls and on-the-spot insurance and banking facilities for smooth transactions.