The total
eclipse of the sun is scientifically called umbra, is the situation where by
the moon totally broke the sun light completely from reaching the certain point
on the planet earth. The situation usually causes the total darkness to fall on
that area of the earth. Different areas of the earth surfaces have faced the
situation in different time spans according to astronomical calendars. Today in Dar es Salam
around 4:00a.m to 8:00p.m in the morning Tigo customers faced what I use to
call the umbra of the mobile network; the total breakdown of the mobile network
communication.
Personally I
have experienced the situation for those few hours, I don’t know about others
but I have found so many people complaining about the situation. Some have
failed to travel in the morning since they couldn’t accomplish some task and
some businesses have stuck since
people couldn’t communicate on time. Today in the morning I was having this
trip to the village somewhere in Kisarawe district.
I was supposed to meet with someone at Karume bus stand I wasn’t able to reach the guy. We add to trace
each other physically at the bus station can you imagine? Believe me you can’t realize the importance of
that small gadget you are having on your hand until the network shuts down.
These
communication shuts down has been a normal thing in Dar es Salaam town
recently. What irritates me more is the fact that we are not even being warned about
these situations. Today I thought my phone was not working until I plugged my
Airtel SIM card which I just removed from my modem to test if the problem was
the network or the phone. The fact that the largest community of the Tanzania
mobile subscribers uses Tigo and Vodacom makes these two giants mobile
companies in Tanzania to be expected to provide quality services to the users
every time.
The
mobile users have been complaining a lot about Tigo services, not about the charges
or how they operate but on the fact that their network is acting as if it has
been over whelmed with the subscribers of the mobile network connections in
Tanzania. Series of communication break downs,
bouncing calls and echo voices has been a normal thing to the Tigo subscribers.
Someone had to say it and I said it. Sometimes you have to call someone several
times before you got the chance to connect to the person.
I don’t know
if Tigo officials and operators are seeing this but I know for sure that they
are familiar with the situation. The situation has been worse in such a way
that people are considering these communication breakdowns to be a normal
thing. I heard someone saying “just dial few
more times you will get the channel, you now its Tigo at night is the normal
thing, everyone is talking for free”.
Yes it’s good talking for free but if we can’t even reach those people
how could we talk to them for free. I think it’s time the mobile phone service
providers they focus more in providing quality communication access to the
people more than just trying to convince
more people to join unstable network connection which makes more trouble to the
network users. It is the time we say no to umbra of the mobile network.