New technology has been introduced over landline connections by Pakistan Telecommunications Limited. This technology was brought to the scene a while ago. Obviously, purpose was to provide the customers with best of working as well as using experience. These are new fiber optic connections that have replaced the old simple copper wire connections. Surely this advancement was to improve service quality but in a country like Pakistan, can we afford these kinds of technologies which have become a problem instead of serving the previous customers?
Before this technology, landlines were issued from old kind of cabinets, not practically old, but taking them as old in comparison with this new technology. Those cabinets were just directly connected to respective exchange through simple copper wires and they didn’t need any source to boost their signals up. But in present technology, these Fiber Optic cables have modernized cabinets which need some electricity source to connect to exchange, but as mentioned earlier, these kinds of cabinets simply failed because of load-shedding. Telephone line gets dead due electricity break out in those area.
It is said that these cabinets are provided with a special pair of imported batteries which are used to backup in case electricity failure, and keeps the connection alive.
Following are the exact words of a PTCL representative as I talked to him on this issue:
PTCL has no lack of funds; it will invest wherever it is needed. The batteries provided for backup are of special kind which cost 1Lac per Pair and have a backup time of 6 to 7 hours.
But sharing my own experience, I face this three times a day when my phone line gets dead with the breakdown of electricity, and this is not only my problem, all the phone lines of in my locality, from same cabinet suffer from this. Number of times we had complained to PTCL concerned department and to their officials but all in vane as they simply replied, SORRY WE CAN’T DO ANYTHING FOR THIS.
Once i quoted above words to another PTCL representative, and he said, i am also from PTCL and there is nothing like this. You have to face this as there are no special batteries, no proper arrangement for them.
Old subscribers are lucky as compared to new ones, who are on ONU lines, as they are not facing such problems because that does not need any source to work i.e. the electricity source.
I have heard from a lot of people even from different cities that most of the new PTCL Broadband customers are suffering from this problem. Some are having other as they say, DSL link drops and it takes ages to connect to Internet as cabinet battery don’t have enough power to withstand the load, so on connection burst, it goes down.
Can we mark it as an advancement in technology? I think changes are made to bring some positive outcome using latest technology, but is this technology adding ease to life or it is causing trouble to those who were well better before this so called advancement in technology?
Previously we had electricity shortfall then we faced water crisis, not ignoring gas shortage problems, but now are we going into an era where we will be facing Dead Landlines? When someone may not even be able to call in case of some emergency?
Alas! we are facing it.
Where are the think tanks of Pakistan? Don’t you think a proper arrangement along with some solid preliminary steps were required before setting this up? If we were not able to setup these installations, do you think we should have gone for them?
