Hello, can you hear me? Pvt mobile lines remain down

TNN | Dec 15, 2016, 12.28 AM IST
Chennai: Mobile phones remained virtual ornaments in the hands of Chennaiites on Tuesday as communication lines remained down after the Monday storm. Residences, small businesses and large corporates shared the agony of not being able to communicate.

While private players like Vodafone, Airtel, Aircel and Reliance Jio failed the citizens, BSNL held out in many areas, but the signals remained weak. Venkatakrishnan R, who was to fly out to Pune, spent all Monday night attempting to connect with an airline's customer call centre to find out if his plane would take off. Multiple attempts from Vodafone and Airtel numbers went in vain.

Commerce was impacted as residents couldn't swipe their cards at merchant establishments which complained of network issues. "I spent two hours in an ATM queue because I needed money for lunch," said Hari Sridhar, a resident of Besant Nagar.

Aircel head (SBU1) K Sankaranarayan said, "Our network has been temporarily impacted. Now 75% of our transmission network is up and things will be normal by end of the day. Once power is restored our sites will be up," he said.

While Airtel and Vodafone mobile networks came to life late Tuesday evening, data connectivity was yet to be restored.

S Murali, business head, Tamil Nadu, Vodafone India said, "Our ground teams have restored voice and data services in some and we should soon be back to normalcy soon. Nearly 21 stores in Chennai are fully operational now."

BSNL landlines were the sole saviour. Of the 6.8 lakh BSNL landline connections, complaints were received for 18,000. BSNL Chennai Telephones chief general manager S M Kalavathi said that major telephone exchanges were operational though smaller ones in areas like Puzhal and Chengalpet were affected due to inundation and uprooting of trees.

Indus Towers, which has more than 7000 cell phone towers in Chennai used by private telecom players, said 60% of its towers were impacted. "Our field operations team is working round-the-clock to ensure network connectivity. Nearly 500 people have been deployed for restoration work," said a spokesman of the company