Internet Fiasco in Panchshila Park
Since the beginning of August, residents of Panchshila Park suddenly started to face outages in their internet services from all their ISPs.
The outages were not for minutes but hours and, in some cases, even days. Some of the service-road houses in N block have seen their internet down for the last 3 days, as checked on 15th August.
This is truly a disaster because people now fully depend on their home Wi-fi connectivity, whether to carry out their business, communications, or entertainment. Even the regular device to device calling was interrupted because the mobile services providers have encouraged wi-fi calling in the absence of adequate in-building solutions and the constant protests by colony residents not to add any towers because of perceived radiation threats.
Even the colony CCTV wires were not spared and were unceremoniously brought down.
The root cause turned out G-20 preparations as the culprit. It seems orders have been passed on to BSES to remove all wiring of ISPs and CCTVs that is seen loosely hanging from their electric poles, in the service roads, facing the main roads.
BSES started taking out these wires without any warning, taking out the service in the colony with it.
The ISPs have been seen working almost 24×7, to bring the services back up. There is a disgruntled murmur in some quarters, and it was shared by one of the ISP engineers, who did not wish to be named, that the primary victims of this are Airtel and ACT. Jio is allegedly being spared. Whilst this could be independently verified, there are no prizes for guessing the reason if this were to be true.
What is interesting is that, technically, the ISPs are supposed to dig trenches and provision the cables underground. However, many of them seem to have doled out heavy permission charges to BSES and have been using their overhead system to lay down these cables. It seemed like an easier thing to do instead of the more expensive and cumbersome underground trenching.
So, this informal arrangement was brought to its knees rather swiftly.
We hope that the ISPs have learnt their lessons and will find a more permanent way of provisioning their services so that people can continue to enjoy them without disruption.
