Bahrain Telecommunication Company (Batelco) said Sunday it will invest 6.8 million Bahraini dinars (16 million dollars) over the next 12 months in the next generation of internet services across the Gulf state. The move is the final phase of a 57-million-dollar scheme to make Bahrain the first country in the world with complete countrywide broadband internet coverage, dpa reported. The scheme aims to include voice, data and video services on a single line, which traditionally only carried voice. Work on the new infrastructure is already complete and the task to migrate services to the new network has begun, according to a statement issued by the company. Thirty thousand lines out of 200,000 are already connected to Batelco's upgraded network, with the final connections scheduled to be completed by July of next year. With the recent launch of the e-government payment gateway in Bahrain, residents can now pay their electricity & water bills and traffic fines without leaving their homes. Plans are in place to introduce a number of additional e-government services in the near future. Batelco, which until a few years back enjoyed a total monopoly over the country's telecom market, has invested 1.4 billion dollars in Bahrain's telecom infrastructure over the past 26 years.
