Customers of Bharti Airtel, one of the leading mobile service providers, in Mumbai are still facing trouble while accessing data and mobile services due to an outage caused by a fire in the telco's Malad office on Tuesday.
The company claims to have restored voice services completely for retail customers, while there are some glitches to be rectified for data services for enterprise customers.
Bharti Airtel said: “All mobile, DSL (digital subscriber line) and mobile data services have largely normalised. However, some customers may be facing intermittent network congestion in some legs during the network stabilisation process. We continue to work on our enterprise services delivery, which will start normalising soon.”
The telco said the fire had impacted some critical installations (such as roaming, IPLC and VSAT links, and internet gateways), which are vital for running voice and data services. The situation required their reconstruction in alternate facilities as well as rerouting of traffic which despite redundancies and expertise available, are time consuming processes.
However, a Mumbai-based insurance company official, requesting anonymity, said, the outage had put their entire communications system in a limbo.
"While our intranet is working, we cannot send or receive emails. The communications team had to run to a local PCO booth to fax some urgent press information to the media," he said. The company is among the top 10 insurance firms in India.
Vishwanath Lele, an Airtel user, said he was depending on his landline for communication. "After two days, the voice network is just opening, but sending message, is still a problem," said Lele.
