Millons Lose Service After Fire Shuts Down GSM Network in Mumbai
Bharti Airtel’s customers in India's Mumbai circle faced severe problems on their network last Friday after a fire took out the company's main switching centre in the city.
In a statement, the company said: "There has been a fire at Peninsula Chambers, Lower Parel, Mumbai, due to a short-circuit in the common power cables, belonging to the power supplier, in the facility area of the building. This has resulted in a temporary disruption in power supply which has impacted our network services in some areas of Mumbai. We are confident of soon restoring normalcy,"
According to figures from the Mobile World database, Bharti Airtel has around 2.5 million customers in the circle as a whole, although the affected areas were limited to South Mumbai, Bandra, Dadar, Khar, Andheri and some Central suburbs.
The temporary disruption lasted most of Friday though, leading to complaints from customers about the lack of back-up services. There was also considerable chatter on internet forums and blogs that the company's call center was not answering phone calls either.
Later in the evening, Bharti issued a second statement, "To alleviate our customers’ problems, we have proactively made provisions to route our customers’ calls and the affected customers, around 20% of our total base, should be able to resume calling in the next few hours."
This statement referred to an agreement the company had swiftly cooked up with Vodafone-Essar to allow roaming onto Vodafone's network in areas where it had surplus capacity whilst repairs were being carried out.
However, by Saturday afternoon customers were still facing problems with outgoing calls still unavailable for many of their customers.
Posted to the site on 20th July 2008
