Langate: The residents of Tangwara, Qaziabad in the Langate area of north Kashmir’s Kupwara district complain of poor cellular services provided by the Jio and Airtel telecom companies.
The residents said that the mobile internet speed had reduced to less than 2G speed while they were also facing problems in connecting voice calls from the Airtel and Jio mobile numbers.
“We are annoyed with the poor cellular services provided by the Airtel and Jio. We tried to approach the customer service executives and engineering teams of both the companies but in vain,” said Farooq Ahmad, a local.
The residents said that they started facing connectivity issues from the last week of January this year and the concerned companies had failed to resolve the issue to date.
“Last week we approached some engineers of the companies who passed the buck saying they will install new mobile towers for the area. It was eyewash to pacify the angry subscribers,” said Iftikhar Ahmad, another resident.
The residents refused to buy the company’s argument of installing new mobile towers saying that there was no issue of connectivity or internet speed till mid-January.
“The concerned employees of the cellular companies are making excuses to buy time. We had no connectivity issues in the past while receiving signals from existing mobile towers located in the adjacent village. We had no such complaints any time,” he said.
The erratic network has left the government employees and students disappointed. The students preparing for various competitive exams complained downloading study material from the internet had become a tough task for them owing to the poor internet speed.
“A small 2 MB or 5 MB document or any small video takes at least 10 minutes to get downloaded. It consumes a lot of time of the students relying on online classes,” said Tafheem, a local student.
The students said their monthly data pack had been wasted as they had not been able to surf the internet for almost a month. Similarly, the government employees who remain connected to their higher-ups through official WhatsApp groups or emails after office hours complained about the slow internet speed and snags in connecting voice calls.
“We remain in touch with our offices through WhatsApp groups on holidays or after office to remain updated with office happenings or to provide feedback to our higher-ups. But it takes us around 10 minutes to download a PDF or a word file to check the communications or circulars of the department,” said Zahoor Ahmad, a government employee.
An official functionary of the Jio Telecom Company said that the issue would be discussed with the engineering team of Kupwara. Similar assurances were given by the concerned officials of Airtel. “The grievances will be looked into,” the official said.