As lakhs of citizens in flood-hit Chennai limp back to normalcy, they are perhaps thanking their mobile phones for providing a vital umbilical — albeit in fits and starts. As long as the hand-helds worked, they were heavily used — for both voice and data.
But as the water levels rose, electricity authorities shut down the power and when the juice ran out, owners had no way to power their mobile phones — except for the fortunate few who received power banks generously shipped by voluntary agencies.
Also, with electric supply drying up, mobile service providers faced their own problems. Around Day 4, some of them conserved their own power backups by tweaking the base station transceivers in a cell, reducing voice traffic but prolonging the time they could handle SMS and data. This choked voice traffic till late at night — but there was at least some way to communicate.
Even in some of the badly waterlogged areas, like Velachery, BSNL services continued to work for days — a testimony to the innate robustness of landlines which don’t need power at the customer end. Deepak A.Chari, a Bengaluru-based executive recounts how two of his relatives, faced with no power and dead mobile phones, pulled out the BSNL line, threw it to the upper floor and reconnected it to their receiver — and maintained a vital link.
But by Friday, many anxious relatives and friends in the rest of India and abroad, reported not being able to contact loved ones in the affected areas. Also, subscribers found that fixed line Internet through cable and fibre optic lines were the early casualties.
The need for satphones As this report is being written, the end of the agony for the flooded south coast is not yet over though returning electricity is rapidly restoring communications. But one question will be asked: Why has India shut the door on the one technology that is likely to provided connectivity even when conventional wired and wireless communications fail — the satellite phone Concerns about their possible use by terrorist organisations and the difficulty in tracing such calls, led the Indian government to ban the use in India of satellite-backed phones which connect to networks of orbiting satellites instead of using terrestrial cell sites. Such services are provided globally by companies such as Inmarsat, Iridium and Thuraya. India is among a handful of nations (like Russia, Cuba, Myanmar, China) which has made the use of satphones illegal. The majority of nations, even those with acute threat perceptions, have realised the technical futility of banning such technologies. In any case, terrorists are now known to be deploying a host of Internet -based technologies — including the private networks that fuel multiplayer gaming platforms like Sony’s PlayStation.
Inmarsat’s flagship satellite handset, the iSatPhone as well as the easily deployable backpack-sized Broadband Global Area Network (BGAN) were deployed with great success earlier this year during the earthquake that ravaged Nepal, to create adhoc WiFi and voice networks which worked when all else failed.
The Indian government has made a small lurch recently towards failsafe communications by partnering with Inmarsat. Satellite phones are currently permitted only specific permissions from the Department of Telecommunications. Presently, use of specific types of Inmarsat terminals like satellite handphones (but not BGAN) are allowed on licence and Tata Communications Ltd (TCL) is permitted to provide Inmarsat services in India under its International Long Distance(ILD) licence. Almost all the licenses issued so far — numbering about 5,000 — are to maritime or security agencies, not to civilian users, private or official.
BSNL has also been given a licence for the providing satellite-based services and an agreement is known to have been signed with Inmarsat. This may widen the population of satellite phones — but the partnership kicks in only early next year.
Such tentative steps have come too late for Chennai. Perhaps the ongoing disaster situation, will persuade government to more fully embrace technology that in the ultimate analysis, will save more lives by providing an all-weather umbilical when it is needed most. In a nation of a billion mobile phones, 5,000 satphones make no impact. For starters, equipping local self government units and all emergency services — if not lay users — in a systematic manner, with such technology will at least ensure the India has a grid of non-terrestrial, all-weather communication to fall back upon when needed. It is ironic that a nation that has robust indigenous satellite technology and even lofts satellites for other countries, does not harness them more fully for its own emergency communications.
The famous epigraph to E.M Forster’s novel, Howards End, read: ‘Only Connect’. In the real world, it remains a challenge — but any technology that can make it happens must not be shunned. That is the loud and message message from Chennai today.
