How India ‘s largest telcos are facing an outage at their core as their network struggles to cope with massive data demands.
On Tuesday, the telcos said that the impact of a massive data overload on the backbone of the national telco network had affected some 1.5 million customers in India and impacted speeds to some 3 million people.
The Telangana Information Technology and Telecommunications Corporation (TITC) said that about 400 million customers have been affected and that the Telangan Telecom Regulatory Authority (TRTA) had been informed.
The telcos had warned that data usage in some areas was up to three times the normal limit and could lead to data disruptions for customers.
The telcos have been working with the government to improve the data network for better management.
The TITC said that at least 4,000 workers were working in the telco’s IT departments, including more than 1,200 in the engineering department, and the telecom ministry was providing them with food, water and other necessities.
“It is a big inconvenience for them.
They have to keep working at this rate to keep up with the demand,” TITT CFO K.V.S. Rao told reporters at a briefing.
The disruption will affect some 800,000 households, the telecom minister told reporters.
A senior TITCo official said the telcoms had been making efforts to improve their network and that data overload was one of the reasons.
However, Rao did not comment on what was the extent of the data overload, or whether the data could be handled better.
He did not elaborate on what steps the government had taken.
The telecom ministry is in talks with the telesales companies to ensure that data throughput is not affected.
“This is a situation where we are working very hard with telcos, including the telangana telco to ensure data capacity is not impacted and we are providing them all the support we can,” Trita Parsi, telecom secretary in the telecom department, told reporters after the briefing.
A senior TIPC official said Telangas telecom infrastructure had been upgraded for the better.
“There is a lot of infrastructure that has been upgraded and the Telayat network is the best in the country,” the official said.
“We are trying to make sure that the telayat data network is not adversely affected by this.”
The telcos have been trying to improve service quality since last year when they upgraded their network to the latest technology, Rao said.
Telanga is also upgrading its power transmission infrastructure and the telafit cable systems.
“The Telayats power infrastructure is also being upgraded and it is being tested in the same manner as the other telecom operators,” he said.
