Following the damages to the fiber optics, the mobile phone customers are suffering from poor network connectivity to no network at all in some sections of the city. The Base Transceiver Station (BTS), which is connected to the network, have failed to function resulting in no service when the fiber is damaged. [break]
Sanju Koirala, director-corporate communication at Ncell said many areas within the valley were repeatedly affected as the authorities were expanding the road without prior information to the telecom operator.
The officials said although they have been facing the problem since the beginning of the expansion, the problem was severe from the month of October. They said it was not just causing them loss of revenue, but also causing them additional resources for repair and more importantly bad customer experience. The disruption for a single hour can also cause them loss of millions of rupees, according to the operators.
Gunakeshari Pradhan, spokesperson of NT said, “Many of our sites have been down because of the expansion.” Pradhan said that although the repairing takes few hours, it´s hard to fix it during daytime because of the traffic.
Madusudan Karmacharya, director of Kathmandu Regional Office of NT said the major problem was lack of proper coordination as the expansion work is carried out by different level of contractors reaching up to petty contractors. “We have been continuously requesting the authority to carry the operation in the presence of our representatives but it is not happening so far,” he added.
Technicians use Optical Time Domain Reflectometer (OTDR) in order to identify the breakage of fiber. Although the fiber might look perfect from outside, the digging causes snap in the core of the fiber. The officials said that although it requires few hours to fix the problem it might take several hours and few days depending upon the availability of resources to identify the problem sometimes.
Karmacharya said that as the expansion is ongoing in several places, it was hard for them to keep track of all the areas and carry the maintenance work. “We have limited human resource and it becomes almost impossible to send technicians to all the affected areas,” Karmacharya clarified the reason for the delay in repairs.
Currently the main areas hit includes road section of Lazimpat to Budhanilkanta, Purano Baneshor chowk, Sanepa to Pulchowk, Hanumanthan, Dhobighat, Ekantanakuna and Kusunti. The other section includes area between Kalimati-Kuleshor-Balkhu and Chabahil-Kalopool.
On the other side, Tulasi Prasad Sitaula, secretary at Ministry of Physical Planning, Works and Transport Management said that they have formed a committee including representatives from telcos to assure the issues like this does not repeat “We are carrying out the work carefully and such complaints might be simply exceptional cases,” he added that weekly meeting was taking place to resolve such issues.
Telecom officials however said that despite the formation of committee, fiber optics network was being affected as the expansion work was not being carried in a way as discussed during the meeting. “The committee has been formed but the problem still exists,” Pradhan added.
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