Ranchi, Aug. 29: Hundreds of cellular phone subscribers of Bharat Sanchar Nigam Limited (BSNL) in the capital had a harrowing time today as they could not receive calls due to a technical snag.
The numbers which suffered the most were of the “74”, “75” and “78” series.
The snag, which began last night, could not be rectified till filing of the report. Interestingly, the top brass of BSNL had no idea about the problem. However, later it was known that the trouble occurred due to a technical snag in Calcutta’s main switching exchange.
As the trouble began last night, it wasn’t noticed by the subscribers until this morning. Today as the day progressed, the subscribers realised there was “something wrong” with their cellular phone as they were not receiving any call.
Throughout the day, those who tried on any BSNL cell number had to listen the one liners like “incoming call facility to the dialled number not available” or the “subscriber is not reachable”. Similar was the problem with short message service (SMS) which was also not being received due to the snag. However, there were no hassles as far as outgoing calls were concerned, either from BSNL to landline or from BSNL to Reliance.
”I have not received a single call throughout the day whereas on any normal day I receive not less than 50 calls,” said a city businessman, who had a tough time as he remained incommunicado from rest of the world. Contacted in the evening, chief general manager (telecom), Jharkhand circle Mahendra Kumar feigned ignorance about the problem.
When told about many complaints throughout the day, he said he would find out the reason behind the trouble and get it rectified as soon as possible.
A senior BSNL official admitted the problems but said it was confined to a selected group of numbers. He attributed the problem to some technical snag in the Calcutta main switching exchange.
“All our calls are routed through Calcutta. It seems there is some problem there. We have got in touch with the officials in Calcutta. I think the problem should be over soon,” he said.
