Telecommunications has made life simple and the world smaller. But this simplicity for end users is assured with great difficulty and acute complexities at the back-end. Hundreds and thousands of people work behind the scenes, often in unfriendly and dangerous situations to make sure our phones and computers have connectivity 24x7.
In this connected age, we sometimes forget the importance of the people who work day-in and day-out to make sure we stay connected, in all parts of the country.
We decided to take you behind the scenes and let you meet the people who as a part of
Ericsson are even risking their lives to make sure that we have signal in our phones, even in the remotest parts of the country.
1.
Abdul Hamid –
This 27 year old belongs to Rishigund town in northern
Kashmir’s Kupwara district. He is a Field Maintenance Engineer with Ericsson and is responsible for maintenance and upkeep of about 30+ network sites in Tangdar, which is one of the most difficult areas of Kashmir because of weather as well as proximity to the Line of Control.
Abdul faced a major challenge about a couple of months ago when one network site at ‘Sadhna Top’ at 13000 feet stopped working. In telecom parlance this particular site was a repeater site and other sites in the region are dependent on it. There was network outage in the area for almost two days because of heavy snowfall. Abdul walked and trekked almost 28 kilometers one way to the site, spent the night but managed to fix the issue which brought connectivity back to mobile phones in the region.
2. Saurav Bora –
Excessive rains and floods are a common phenomenon in parts of
Assam. Every year floods cause a lot of difficulty in the region uprooting people from their homes, disconnecting them from the other parts of the country and even from their friends and family. While food, shelter and medicines remain the top priority during relief operations; restoring mobile connectivity is equally important.
Saurav Bora is a
Network Area manager for Ericsson and shares his experience of working on a network restoration project after floods in the Dhemaji area of Assam recently. “Due to floods, the network in the area had gone down. The 5-6 feet deep flood water made it difficult to check our cables which were largely underground. Undeterred by the difficulty facing us, we took a boat and headed out to identify the issue and set it right.”
Bora’s team relied on a lot of make-shift solutions using bamboo sticks to identify the problem and then proceeded to an area where the water was a little less and fixed it. Bora says, “With some improvisation and the training that we have been provided, we were able to safely traverse through water, identify the issue and fix it.
3. Jaya Sapnam – She is known amongst her work colleagues as
Mary Kom – she is one of the very few woman engineers who works in the field as a Maintenance Engineer. In simple words, she is responsible for making sure people get mobile networks in their devices.
Jaya is out on the field at least once every week making sure everything is working seamlessly. At times , she even has to examine and monitor telecom equipment on top of the towers, which gets a
lot of onlookers as people seldom see lady engineers doing such jobs, especially in Imphal.
