Grameenphone Ltd. has been able to restore coverage in almost all areas within its network around the country as of Sunday (Nov 18th).
Disruption in the power supply resulted in many base-stations going out of service. However, Grameenphone was able to keep 70% of its entire network operational throughout the critical first 36-hour period after the cyclone, which battered the Khulna-Barisal coastal belt and passed through the country Thursday night.
With the subsequent power outage, resulting collapse of the National power grid Friday morning, the telecommunication network was particularly affected as mobile phone services were disrupted when the network base stations began to shutdown due to power exhaustion. Most base stations are equipped either with backup batteries or generators for a limited period of time.
It should be noted that Grameenphone would have suffered significant network coverage loss had it not been for the timely actions of the technical teams working around the clock at the head office and on the field. At the height of the crisis, almost 93% of the base stations were being maintained on back-up power sources alone by recharging the batteries and refueling the generators.
While there have been no reports of any physical damage to network installations as result of the cyclone, however, technical teams are not being able to reach some base station sites in the affected coastal areas. Damage, so far, has been restricted to few microwave transmission links being misaligned due to the strong winds.
Grameenphone is happy to report that there has been no significant service interruption within the network and that and all core, prepaid, recharging and service nodes were up through the entire crisis period.
Chief Technical Officer, Shafiqul Islam, who was at the helm of the emergency network support team, defined the critical part of the job was "to first ensure that the employees were safe and once that was determined, that network was kept up and running as best as possible under the circumstances."
Currently there are only 5% base stations inoperative, concentrated mainly in the hardest hit areas; the rest of the Grameenphone network in the country is fully functional and operating on normal parameters.
Grameenphone has over 5700 base stations sites located around the country.

Information Department
Grameenphone Ltd.
Phone: 9882990
email: info@grameenphone.com