Doha: Qatar Telecom will diversify its network to ensure that road works and accidents do not cause an outage of fixed line and mobile telephones and related services in various parts of the country, Dr Nasser M Marafih, Chief Executive Officer, Qtel, said here on Thursday.
In recent months, labourers accidentally damaging trunk, fibre-optic underground cables have been responsible for at least two major communication service outages in the capital.
The first major incident occurred over a month ago when workers of a road repair company accidentally damaged a trunk cable near the Emiri Diwan, causing an outage of services in various important offices. The last incident was in the Old Airport area where residents and offices were left without fixed line telephones after a cable in the area was hit by construction equipment.
Dr Nasser said, such diversification will allow telecom services to be diverted via other routes to any particular area in the country. Hence, even if a cable in that area is damaged, telephones will continue to work.
He said, the problem of damaged cables had affected Qtel in recent months but the company considered it an unavoidable evil in view of the larger interests of the country, whose civil infrastructure is being upgraded
© The Peninsula 2006
