The serial blasts affected telephone services badly in Mumbai, jamming both mobile and landline services in the city. This was due to a network overloading as subscribers were trying to get in touch with their relatives and friends to enquire about their safety.Mumbai city registers around 20 million minutes of telephony traffic perhour during the peak time. However, in time of a calamity this rises by 8-10 times, resulting in an over-crowding of the network, industrysources told Business Standard.This was what had happened during the first hour of the serial blasts, withcalls from both across the country and overseas coming into India, whichresulted in jamming of the networks.Subscribers in the city said that they received recorded messages that "alllines are busy" or the "subscriber cannot be reached", irrespective of theservice provider. Attempts to reach friends and relatives who commute bytrains were futile and this was true to both landline and mobile networks.However, telecom companies refuted this.Tata Tele General Manager SanjayThakur said that the company's wirelines were functional in the city, while wireless lines had experienced some congestion. However, he said that there was no outage on the company's networks."Calls were going through the landlines and there were no congestion," he said.Hutch Chief Operations Manager Harit Nagpal also said that the networks werenot down, but were working at peak capacity. "Everybody was trying to reacheverybody else and this had resulted in overcrowding of the networks, butour networks were working efficiently".Reliance Communications spokesperson said the company's networks were up andrunning and subscribers did not face any problems. Sources in Idea, Hutchand BPL also claimed that their networks were up and running. Mumbai is serviced by BSNL, MTNL, Reliance, Tatas, BPL, Hutch, Idea andAirtel, and the companies provide service to over eight million subscribers.Western Railway Helpline No.: 22005388
