TURA:
Garo Hills is reeling under frequent mobile and internet services outage for the past week with subscribers of BSNL, the largest public sector company, experiencing grueling days of network disruption caused by what inside sources reveal is lack of maintenance of equipment.
The BSNL in Garo Hills controls the largest share of consumers for the digital and internet services. It’s broadband and Fiber network (FTTH) alone generates revenue to the tune of Rs 8 lakh each month, and it continues to grow with more subscribers being added in.
Tura alone has the largest share of 1200 FTTH and 400 broadband subscribers.
Despite a burgeoning population of subscribers, the company continues to treat its golden goose with neglect.
The entire BSNL network went down on Monday afternoon and was restored only late Tuesday morning, a full 18-long hour, in what company officials claimed was a fiber snap caused by a landslide, 3 km from Jengjal on the main national highway.
Ironically, although Jengjal is just 30 km from Tura, and located on the main highway, the restoration teams took more than half a day to get Garo Hills back online.
This disruption comes barely three days after a similar outage broke all previous records with a 72-hour long shutdown paralysing Garo Hills subscribers across the five districts.
Giving inside details, a source from within the BSNL in Garo Hills confirmed that company officials have failed for years to follow the standard operating procedures or SoPs leading to this ‘accumulating’ decay in its working condition.
“There is a procedure called Preventive Maintenance by which we check all vulnerable systems, do the required boosting and prepare backups for any foreseen disaster. Given the sensitivity of the Northeastern region’s terrain and weather, we are supposed to undertake this annual exercise before the onset of the monsoons. All private companies do that, except us,” reveals an official.
The last six days of chaotic disruption appears to give weight to this accusation.
When entire mobile and internet service went down for 72 hours, beginning on May 18 that was attributed to lightning strikes on towers in Jengjal and Bajengdoba in North Garo Hills, an added delay in network restoration was because the backup diesel generator at Bajengdoba exchange was faulty for lack of maintenance. A technician from Assam had to work an entire day to get it started.
Monday’s fiber optics snap at Jengjal was supposed to have been a few hours’ job, but once again logistics played a role in keeping Garo Hills out of the digital world.
The agreement for the hired vehicle used by BSNL field teams had reportedly lapsed and no effort was made to renew it. After many more delays, the technical team was finally able to board another vehicle at an exorbitant rate of Rs 16 per kilometre, besides other charges, to reach the site and get the system back online.
“These issues are just a part of a bigger problem in the company. Unless urgent rectification is done, we will soon be left with no consumers. As it is, Jio and Airtel are going aggressive in their campaign to take in the biggest number of customers. They have the technology and the money,” a worried official narrated seeing the writing on the wall.