Be it any cellular company with sky rocketing promises and hefty offers, they are irresistible to extremities
but when it comes to Shillong city most of the cellular companies fail to give a satisfactory service to its consumers in terms of connectivity. Talking about the network, almost all the cellular companies provide a healthy network on the road but as soon as you enter any building, the network goes off at its will. The subscribers also complained that when a complaint is being made to the concerned mobile operators, the call executives only give a specific date of solving the problem but it is never materialized.
It may be mentioned that earlier, even the first citizen of the state, RS Mooshahary had expressed his unhappiness with the poor mobile services in city while blaming the absence of a stable telecommunication network for the failure of e-governance making any impact on the people.
Often the cellular companies blame some cut or ongoing construction as the main reason for the poor network but however, the subscribers are still at the receiving end.
The situation in the rural areas is at its worst as it cannot be guaranteed that network signal would retain in the cell phone when one goes to internal villages of the state especially the Indo-Bangla border. When contacted, an official of a popular company said there are many reasons for poor indoor coverage. While citing an example, he said often one building gets shadowed when some more buildings come up in between and strong signal cannot be reached.
He also said that Meghalaya is a hilly place and it’s a big challenge to provide a strong signal due to difficult and hilly terrain. He also said that another reason for poor network is the congestion in towers which mostly happen due to overflowing subscribers. So while we wait for these problems to be addressed, we simply have to … ‘redial’!
(By Aafaque Hussain)