For lakhs of citizens in Chennai and other flood affected areas south, their mobile phone was their only umbilical -- for a few days. They were heavily used for talk, SMS and data (like WhatsApp) and in many places even after landlines failed due to damage to lines.
As the water level rose and trees fell in many places, power cables fell down, forcing Electricity authorities to shut down power even before it was disrupted, in the interests of safety. Since Chennai has been plagued by long power cuts for many years, people who can afford them had installed back up systems or in flats, had large gen sets to fall back on. When even this was exhausted, owners had no way to power their mobile phones - except for the fortunate few who were reached with the power banks generously shipped by voluntary agencies outside the affected areas.
With electric supply drying up, the mobile service providers faced their own problems. Around Day 4, some of them conserved their own power back ups by shutting down some of 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 some way to communicate.
Deepak A Chari, a Bengaluru-based executive, who has many of his close relatives in Chennai, could connect with them through text messages even when mobile voice failed.
In some waterlogged areas, like Velachery, BSNL services continued to work for days -- testifying to the innate robustness of landlines, which don't need power at the customer end. Chari recounts how his cousins, a husband and wife, faced with no power, dead mobile phones and water entering their ground floor apartment, pulled out the BSNL line, threw it to the upper floor and reconnected it to their receiver -- and maintained the vital link.
By Friday, many in the rest of India, reported not being able to contact loved ones in the affected areas by any telephone, fixed or mobile -- though the experience was not uniform.
Another interesting facet was that Internet on mobiles or through wireless dongles was from early on, the only sure way to get on the Net. For them, Skype and other Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) speech services were a Godsend. Subscribers found that fixed line Internet through cable was the first casualty of the rains.
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 organizations and the difficulty to 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 terrestrial cell sites. Such services are provided globally by companies like 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 pereptions, 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 PlayStation.
(Inmarsat iSat phones)
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 permitted only with specific permission from Department of Telecommunications. Presently use of specific types of INMARSAT terminals ( 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 5000 are to maritime or security agencies, not to civilian users, private or official.
(A lady using the Sat phone during the Nepal Earthquake, May 2015)
BSNL has also been given a licence for providing satellite-based services and an agreement is known to have been signed with Inmarsat. But it 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, 5000 sat phones make no impact. For starters, equipping local government units -- if not lay users -- in a systematic manner, with such technology will at least ensure the India has a grid of non terrestrial communication to fall back upon when needed.
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 message from Chennai today.
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