Guwahati, Dec. 28: The BSNL's Assam telecom circle today announced that all SBI branches in the state would be covered by high-speed Internet network by next month for speedy transactions.

The telecom major, which has recently partnered with the SBI, has already upgraded the bank's 317 branches out of 394 in Assam from VSAT (very small aperture terminal) technology to leased lines of broadband. "The BSNL has already upgraded 82 per cent of the branches. Seventy-seven branches are left, which will be covered within January," Kaushik Sinha, deputy general manager and circle development officer of SBI (Northeast), told reporters at the BSNL office here today.

"This way, the bank can now open an account within a few minutes. Other transactions, done through the core banking system, have also become faster. For CBS, a high-speed Internet is very necessary," Sinha said. Through the VSAT technology, the SBI branches had an Internet speed of 512 kilobytes (0.5 megabyte) per second which has increased to 2 megabyte per second (mbps) after the upgrade, he added.

Explaining, chief general manager of BSNL Assam circle, M.K. Seth, said: "The VSAT does not have a very high bandwidth. Broadband has an expandable bandwidth capacity but at times gets shared between several users. So the speed decreases when the data usage is high. A lease line is a dedicated broadband line and does not get shared. So, it is much faster than other broadband network lines."

The step comes in the wake of the Union and state government's drive to promote cashless transactions. The BSNL along with SBI will launch Mobicash, a mobile wallet under the cashless initiative.