Prepaid outgoing services affected for over 8 hours

Excelsior Correspondent

JAMMU, Dec 3: Prepaid outgoing mobile services were affected in the eight Northern States including J&K since late last night due to a fault at Nodal Centre Chandigarh putting the customers to a lot of trouble.
According to A K Mishra General Manager, BSNL Mobile J & K Circle there was a fault in Intelligent Network (IN) at Nodal Chandigarh since this morning that affected the functioning of outgoing prepaid services in eight Northern States including J&K.
He said the fault has been rectified this evening and the services have been resumed in the entire region. The States where the outgoing prepaid services were affected included UT of Chandigarh, U P East, UP West, Rajasthan, Delhi, Himachal Pradesh, Punjab, Haryana and Jammu and Kashmir, he added.
Mr Mishra said the fault was rectified this evening and the prepaid services in the entire region were restored fully.
The outgoing prepaid services were affected as no phone call became possible since 10 am till 6-30 pm this evening hitting millions of customers in these States.
In J&K alone 8.91 lakh prepaid customers had to bare the brunt of the fault as their outgoing calls were barred for over eight hours putting them to lot of trouble.
The sudden barring of prepaid outgoing calls has generated a lot of resentment among the BSNL customers. The customers contacted the BSNL offices both in Srinagar and Jammu to know about the reason of barring of outgoing calls suddenly.
BSNL DGM Mobile Kashmir, Nazir Ahmed when contacted said that the services remained affected in Valley also and he received phone calls from various customers who were eager to know the reasons for sudden break down of the network.
However a BSNL official said that the problem was restricted only to pre-paid customers, as the postpaid customers and Closed User Group (CUG) could make calls.
He said, the affected customers could receive their calls from any network and also send and receive SMS.
Customers complained that they were not able to dial up any number on their mobile handsets and the call was not getting through.