Bhubaneswar/Cuttack, June 17: Telecom service provider Bharat Sanchar Nigam Limited (BSNL) has blamed frequent digging of roads for damage to their cable lines across the twin cities.
"The road and drain construction, sewerage job and the laying of water supply lines have become so frequent that the underground cables are getting damaged at many places, leading to call drops, and at times, difficulty in disbursing broadband services," said chief general manager (technical) of the Odisha telecom circle Bijayananda Mishra.
Talking to The Telegraph on the sidelines of the all-India official launch of free roaming facility for the BSNL subscribers in Bhubaneswar yesterday, Mishra said: "We are not the only ones to suffer. Other service providers are also facing problems."
On February 25, broadband services at Pokhariput had got disrupted due to digging of roads by the Odisha Water Supply and Sewerage Board for laying pipelines. Operations at five banks were disrupted due to the damage to cables and around 1,100 landline connections. Besides, at least 720 broadband connections were hit.
Mishra said that not only Pokhariput, but also Lakshmisagar and almost the entire stretch of the Cuttack road had experienced such disruption due to digging of roads in the past two months.
Another BSNL official said that had there been co-ordination among various agencies and specific utility corridors been provided while designing the roads, people's suffering could have been reduced.
Utility corridor is a space allocated along a road, bridge or any such civil engineering structure through which power cables, telephone lines or water pipelines can pass through. It is so designed that even if there was changes on the road structure, the space on the utility corridor remains unaffected ensuring no damage to the cables and pipelines.
Pokhariput resident Loknath Dash said: "The signalling is poor here. Besides, the damaged cables add to our woes."
A Bhubaneswar Municipal Corporation official said: "A specific utility corridors could lessen the problem. However, the damage to the BSNL cables due to the projects may not always be true, as in many instances, the workers of the telecom company themselves dig up roads without obtaining any permission from the corporation."
Another official said: "There could be some difficulty due to the civic projects, but the BSNL service provider should also admit that they often delay in repairing the cables."
On the other hand in Cuttack, rampant construction for the integrated sanitation project, in collaboration with the Japan International Co-operation Agency, has now started telling upon the telecom users.
Optical fibres of several telecommunication providers, including the BSNL, get damaged due to the project, leading to disruption in services. The worst hit are the BSNL broadband consumers as they claim that the authorities take almost 36 hours to resolve the problem.
"For the past two weeks, there have been severe problems in telephone lines, especially during the evening hours. We are unable to contact anybody, while there is an acute problem of poor network coverage," said Mangalabag resident Dilip Sahu.
Sahu, however, said there were similar call drops with other mobile service providers, apart from the cross connection problem.
"I have a prepaid connection, and we have to pay for even those cross connections for no fault of us," said Pithapur resident Subendu Pradhan.
Cuttack Municipal Corporation officials, however, were not available for comments on the lack of co-ordination among various agencies carrying out the civic projects.
