Hills fume over bad BSNL broadband connection

Darjeeling : Residents here demonstrated in front of the BSNL office today to protest against the delay in restoring Internet services, which had been down for the past five days.

The service was finally restored around 6pm.

Before that, however, the BSNL authorities were forced to call police to intervene before the protests got out of hand. The protesters included hotel-owners, travel agents cyber café-owners and residents. They threatened to gherao the telephone exchange if the problem persisted.

“The travel industry here has to depend on the Internet because 90 per cent of the bookings are made online. It is strange that the people concerned (BSNL officials) cannot restore services even after five days,” said Pradip Lama, secretary, Darjeeling Association of Travel Agents.

Lama and others claimed that they were continuously filing complaints but to no avail. “If the problem persists, we will stop these officials from entering the exchange. If they cannot do their job, what is the use of letting them enter the office,” the association secretary added.

U.K. Das, the subdivisional engineer (group) of the BSNL, further incensed the protesters when he reportedly told them to go to Siliguri. “Why should we go to the higher authorities when it is the duty of officials here to provide us quality services?” asked Lama.

The agitators were also peeved over the non-availability of higher officials at the exchange. While subdivisional engineer (internal) Sushil Das and subdivisional officer (telephone) V. Bhattacharya were on leave, divisional engineer (hills) D.C. Majumdar had gone down to Siliguri, reportedly to attend a meeting.

A. Bhowmick, junior telecom officer (switch room), said Internet connections went down on October 31 because of a technical snag in the optical fibre line between Siliguri and Calcutta. By the time this was repaired, a stretch of optical fibre cable was stolen somewhere between Darjeeling and Mirik, he claimed.

There are 225 broadband and 15 DIAS connections in Darjeeling. Both depend on the optical fibre cables, which go down to Siliguri from this hill town by a single route (the one through Mirik).

Source: The Telegraph