“2 MORE DAYS”- Tata Sky woes not over for all

NEW DELHI: Tata Sky subscribers across the country faced inconvenience for the second straight day on Thursday as their television screens went blank without warning. There was no respite from the DTH service provider’s customer service too as helplines went dead. And now it seems the problem is likely to continue for another two days for a section of subscribers.

People took to Twitter to vent their ire. “Tata Sky is still behaving like TataSigh!” tweeted a customer.

However, Harit Nagpal, MD and CEO with Tata Sky, attributed the outage to routine maintenance issues. “To extract more capacity from the same satellite asset we have to introduce new compression standards frequently. This introduction is likely to cause disturbance to a small number of subscribers, across the country. To discover these customers we run a test signal for some time which was done last evening. About 17,000 customers of our 1 crore-plus base experienced the disturbance,” he said.

Subscribers complained customer service wasn’t of any help. “Why is it that whenever there’s a major problem with @TataSky the helplines never work? Seems to be a major issue in #Bangalore today,” tweeted Ruma Singh.

Nagpal said the company was not geared to handle so many calls. “A scroll on the default channel as well as our website informed all customers of an SMS they could send in case they experienced the disturbance as we expect call centre lines to get choked under such circumstances. Our remote and field service teams were geared to handle this event as we carry it out about 2-3 times a year,” he said.

“The signals were reversed back to the old format this afternoon and our technicians will be visiting the customers over the next two days to realign their antennae. Customers will obviously not be charged for this service visit,” he added.