Operation of mobile phones, TV channels disrupted

---

FE Report
Operations of mobile telecommunications and TV channels, including the state-run Bangladesh Television (BTV), faced a major setback Friday as the cyclone SIDR badly disrupted the country's power supply.
The state-run BTV had to suspend its transmission for nearly three hours Friday, first time in its history, due to outage of power for a long time.
A reliable source said BTV's transmission remained halted from 11.40 am to 2.30 pm as its own power generator failed.
Meanwhile, TV cable operators in many areas failed Friday to provide satellite TV services due to the power disruption. However, most homes in the city had to go without power on the day.
The power cut has also caused sufferings to a large number of mobile telephone subscribers as the network remained disrupted since Thursday night, sources said.
Apart from this, they said, hundreds of Bangladesh Telegraph and Telephone Board (BTTB) telephones under different exchanges, especially in the industrial belts, remained cut-off.
"Some of our base-stations located at 6000 sites across the country stopped functioning as backup support by batteries and generators expired," Syed Yamin Bakth, general manager of Grameenphone, told the FE Friday night.
He said all required steps including refueling of generators have already been taken to activate those base-stations at the earliest.
Bakth said: "GP's base-stations at Borguna and Mongla, which were hit by cyclone, will be operational soon as our engineers have almost completed necessary work."
Talking to the FE, Fakhruddin Ahmed Chowdhury, general manager of Teletalk Bangladesh Ltd, said some of their base-stations went out of operation because of acute power shortage.
"We have arranged mobile generators to make them functional soon," he said.
Another mobile operator source said restoration of normalcy in their mobile network in the cyclone hit 15 districts will take time as some base-stations have stopped functioning due to gusty wind of SIDR.
When asked, BTTB official sources said they are also taking necessary steps to repair the network.