<b>Mumbai blasts: Phones jammed</b>

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 per
hour during the peak time. However, in time of a calamity this rises by
 8-10 times, resulting in an over-crowding of the network, industry
sources told Business Standard.

This was what had happened during the first hour of the serial blasts, with
calls from both across the country and overseas coming into India, which
resulted in jamming of the networks.

Subscribers in the city said that they received recorded messages that "all
lines are busy" or the "subscriber cannot be reached", irrespective of the
service provider. Attempts to reach friends and relatives who commute by
trains were futile and this was true to both landline and mobile networks.

However, telecom companies refuted this.Tata Tele General Manager Sanjay
Thakur 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 were
not down, but were working at peak capacity. "Everybody was trying to reach
everybody else and this had resulted in overcrowding of the networks, but
our networks were working efficiently".

Reliance Communications spokesperson said the company's networks were up and
running and subscribers did not face any problems. Sources in Idea, Hutch
and BPL also claimed that their networks were up and running.

Mumbai is serviced by BSNL, MTNL, Reliance, Tatas, BPL, Hutch, Idea and
Airtel, and the companies provide service to over eight million subscribers.

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