The Hindu : U.S. blackout: lessons for India

Online edition of India's National Newspaper
Saturday, Aug 16, 2003

Opinion

Opinion - News Analysis

U.S. blackout: lessons for India

By Anand Parthasarathy

Bangalore Aug. 15. How well can today's high tech communication systems such as the Internet and mobile telephony cope with disaster situation?

The massive power breakdown in the Eastern States of Canada and the United States for nearly a day starting Thursday afternoon highlighted the relative vulnerability of different technologies, old and new, that people use to communicate in an emergency.

The experience in New York City and the surrounding areas which suffered 80 percent blackouts affecting 50 million people has useful lessons for Indian customers — as well as telecom operators: Mobile phones which citizens increasingly depend upon for their personal communication are the first to break down.

"The cellular network is not fully up to the challenges of public emergencies," writes The New York Times today. Reason: even without a power failure, a sudden spurt in traffic tends to swamp the networks.

But as this week's incident showed, many mobile providers do not bother to provide adequate back-up power systems in all their cellular stations.

As a result huge — holes — appear in the network and thousands of subscribers find they cannot call their loved ones in an emergency — a facility which was their primary reason for acquiring a mobile connection in the first place.

Observers have also pointed out that by and large, cellular operators worldwide do not have a system that assigns priorities to different categories of calls.

It is often all or nothing. The traditional landline telephone system — these days derisively called the Plain Old Telephone System or POTS — is far more resilient. Telephone exchanges have traditionally been running with large banks of batteries that can sustain the system for several hours without mains power.

In New York pay phones and call booths worked almost uninterruptedly through out the blackout.

Ironically, many homes could not use their landlines even though the lines were open because of the fancy cordless systems they had installed — which required electricity.

There is a lesson for Indian customers of cordless or answering systems: keep the main connection free of such electrically driven devices.

As in the September 11 disaster in 2001, Internet remained the hero of the day. It provided people with uninterrupted service and rode over the increased traffic.

In fact AOL, the largest U.S. Net service provider, reported an initial dip in traffic from 2.4 million users to 2.1 million because many surfers could not power their PCs. Laptop owners had no such problem — but another amber signal for India which is an early adapter of the 802.11b wireless Internet technology: this is not as reliable as the good old dialup and will fail almost as fast as the cellular phone nets.

One lesson from New York will be particularly striking for Indians who live in high security areas like the national capital region or the Kashmir valley: The possibility that the U.S. blackout yesterday might be the result of a terrorist attack was ruled out after a few hours — but at no time was the communication lifeline of the people snapped by any overt official action.

In contrast, this is often the first knee jerk reaction of the Indian Government agencies. STD/ISD booths remained closed for many months in Kashmir and cellular phone services are still denied to many citizens there with the argument that these might help terrorists.

The day of the attack on the Indian Parliament also saw a virtual telecom blackout in surrounding areas of Delhi which was blamed on traffic overload.

Many experts did not buy this theory at the time. For the Indian customer just tasting the fruits of emerging telecom technologies, the core lessons from this week's New York experience are three fold: Take an Internet connection if you can afford one.

It is such a huge network with so many players that it is difficult to bring down too easily.

Hang on to that land phone — it may be the only thing that works in an emergency — unless ofcourse the authorities shut it down deliberately.

And as for that sexy looking cell phone don' bet on it when the chips are down.

Printer friendly page
Send this article to Friends by E-Mail

Opinion