The Hindu : National : Mobile phone networks fail during blasts

Online edition of India's National Newspaper
Thursday, Jul 13, 2006

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National

Mobile phone networks fail during blasts

Staff Reporter

A case of overload, says an official

Mumbai: The only means of communication for the commuters — the mobile phone — failed again at the time of crisis — the serial blasts in Mumbai's suburban railway network on Tuesday.

There was all-round criticism by harried subscribers of the service providers for failed networks, as this is the second time since last July's deluge that cell phone networks failed in the time of crisis.

However, T.V. Ramachandran, Secretary General, Cellular Operators' Association of India (COAI), told The Hindu, "it is purely an issue of overloaded networks. It must be remembered that calls from all over the world were coming in and traffic was well beyond the capacities of the networks.''

The operators have designed their networks with capacities based on experience and the environment and a safety margin of around 30-40 per cent over and above the peak business hours. ``It is unviable for the operators to maintain networks with much higher capacities because spectrum is a finite and precious resource."

Number of calls

``Erlang is the unit of talk and milli-erlangs measure the number of simultaneous calls that can be handled at any given time. A typical mobile telephone exchange can handle around 2 million calls simultaneously. ``What happens during a crisis of this nature is that the number of calls on any network outstrip capacity of the operators by several times and so the network crashes. A similar situation prevailed in New York during the 9/11 terror attacks when the networks could just not handle the volume of traffic,'' said Mr. Ramachandran.

``The situation on Tuesday was different from last year's deluge in that during the flooding, several areas witnessed deliberate power cuts in order to prevent short circuits and that added to the problems. Also, several of the network towers were under water,'' said Kobita Desai, principal analyst, Gartner, a leading telecom consultancy. ``Tuesday's situation was mainly because of the heavy density of traffic which the networks could not handle.''

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