Trouble for BSNL customers again
For the second consecutive day, BSNL mobile users in the city experienced disruption in services for hours together after the switching unit on Haddows Road crashed under the load of excessive call traffic.According to sources, unrelated as it may seem, it appears that the electrical snag at the Coimbatore switching unit had set off a crisis on the Haddows Road unit. As cellphones went blank in the area served by the Coimbatore unit, mobile users seem to have made repeated attempts to land a particular number.The artificial traffic generated through repeated attempts escalated to levels the network was not configured for, the sources said. Incidentally, the Coimbatore switching unit has been fully restored.An estimated 2.50 lakh CellOne subscribers are parented to the Nortel switch on Haddows Road. Officials said calls got blanked only when a user entered the operational radius of the switch, which had undergone modification in the software only a couple of days ago.On Friday afternoon, troubleshooting at the Haddows Road unit was being guided by an engineer located in the U.S. who had logged on to the network. By 5 p.m., the system was rebooted, and the network was expected to normalise within a couple of hours, a BSNL official said.
