GSM Networks in Mumbai Rains

Mumbai has 4 GSM players, viz MTNL, Orange (Hutch), Airtel and BPL Mobile. Traditionally Orange and Airtel have been considered "better" operators in terms of services, network coverage etc. But Mumbaiites were for a little surprise on the way things shaped up on the 'Terrible Tuesday' 26th July 2005 when in a single day Mumbai received a meter of rainfall, highest ever in India.

The biggest surprise, or should I say shock was by Orange. Just a few hours of rainfall was all that was needed to bring Orange networks completely down. No incoming, no outgoing, no sms, in fact the network indicators gave the 'No Network' message in all of Mumbai for 48 hours for Hutch subscribers. Even after 48 hours the network was strictly ok, very much on and off and GPRS remained inaccessible for a couple of more days. Complete recovery took a full one week! To top it up, Orange offered no explaination, no comensation and no extension of due date for it's subscribers.

BPL Mobile, unlike orange, did not exactly give "No Network" error, but 80% of the calls to and from BPL mobile phones used to get dropped in less than 5 seconds of calling. SMS was working but they took from a few minutes to several hours to get delivered. Again, GPRS was not working, and complete recovery back to normal took about 3 days. Like Orange, no public messages or explainations were provided by the company.

Considering the bad track record of MTNL's Dolphin and Trump, nobody expected MTNL mobiles to even work but surprisingly both Dolphin and Trump mobiles worked perfectly well in most places in Mumbai. Though there was a small network downtime of about 2-3 hours on Tuesday things quickly recovered and stayed good for most of the week.

The winner comes out to be none other than Airtel. Excellent network, zero downtime and very strong customer support. Airtel was the first company to start sending smses to users warning them about Tsunami and other rumours as well as the only company to announce free calls for it's postpaid customers for 2 days after the rains. There was no other way the services could have been better.

Bottomline: No matter how much 'natak' the network companies do, one of the important measures of their quality is the sheer network performance in such times. Here, Orange was a very big disappointment and Airtel came out the best.


P.S.> Airtel still sends spam sms and I hate that about it.