Aircel hopes to restore services in Tamil Nadu in two days

The company saw porting requests going up to 800,000 on Thursday

Telecom service provider Aircel on Friday said that it hopes to restore the service network in Tamil Nadu, as it is working on bringing up towers, which were switched off by its infrastructure provider earlier.

With more customers applying to port the number from its services, some of the other telecom service providers are working extra hours to attract more customers to their services.

"We have started bringing up the towers from Thursday night and we hope that in two days, things will be back to normal. Many of the customers who have applied for port code are not using it now. We are working at maximum speed to bring back the towers," said K Sankara Narayanan, head - SBU (South), Aircel.

Narayanan said that the company is continuing its discussion with the tower infrastructure provider to bring the network back to normal and the fact that some of the towers are coming back itself shows that there is some progress in the talks.

On Thursday, the company received the highest number of requests to port the mobile number at around 800,000 requests. The surge in requests has choked the system, which has a capacity to handle less than 100,000 porting requests a month. With the system failing to send the porting codes on time, worried customers thronged the Aircel shops earlier this week.

Aircel has around 15 million customers in Tamil Nadu, where the company hails from, out of the total 89 million customers across the country.

Meanwhile, outlets of some of the other telecom service providers are working almost 12 hours every day to serve the increased number of porting enquiries coming to them following the crisis.

While the company has started communicating the codes through its outlets, there are only around 50 outlets for the company in Tamil Nadu. The company has generated porting code for those who applied till Thursday, which is made available in the outlets.

Aircel, promoted by Malaysian firm Maxis Communication, has been into financial crisis in the recent past, including severe competition and banks restricting credit lines to the players due to various issues. A proposed deal to merge the company with Reliance Communications also failed earlier.

The latest issue started with one of the tower infrastructure providers which operates 10,000 towers for Aircel in Tamil Nadu, allegedly switched off around 9,000 towers, which has affected the services to the customers. The dispute is related to payment of a penalty to be paid by the telecom company to the infrastructure provider for around five to six circles closed down a few years ago, said sources. The matter is also pending in the court.

Aircel also has around 1,000 out of the total 5,000 employees in the company, located in Tamil Nadu. Sources from the industry said that in case of winding up of a company, which would have at least a window of 90 days even if such a decision comes in, the already struggling telecom sector may not have the capacity to absorb such large numbers.