Generally speaking, we all imagine the internet as a cloud — something ethereal and omnipresent that floats in the air around us. But the truth is, the internet isn’t just an abstract cluster of servers and fiber-optic cables. It is a web of glass threads as thin as human hair, woven by man and lying at the bottom of the ocean or buried under our streets. Today, tens of thousands of BSNL (Bharat Sanchar Nigam Limited) users in Kerala and Tamil Nadu are reminded of how physical this medium can be, as essential maintenance and ‘fiber cuts’ have left parts of South India in the dark.
The Undersea Lifeline
The downtime is due to maintenance on undersea cable systems. These cables are the arteries of the modern global internet, carrying data as pulses of light between continents and undersea to coastal regions. When a massive cable is damaged, whether by normal wear and tear, seismic activity, or an errant ship anchor, data traffic has to be rerouted.
Think of it as if you were closing a major eight-lane highway to repave it. All of the cars (data packets) need to be shunted onto smaller side roads. Inevitably, this causes massive congestion. For the user, this equates to painfully slow speeds or no connectivity at all. BSNL does have redundancy plans, but the volume of traffic in these states is at times too high during scheduled maintenance windows, which can congest the backup routes.
The Local Fiber Factor
Adding insult to injury, there are reports of local fiber cuts. Road-widening and construction projects are the internet service providers’ natural enemies in India’s rapidly expanding urban spaces, where fiber-optic cables are often run through sewer systems or other complex, out-of-the-way places. Excavators, the diggers in high-visibility vests that you see on building sites, cut through the “last-mile” fiber optic cables strung between local exchanges and households.
Fiber optics works by transmitting pulses of light through glass cores. A single collective cut stops that light in its tracks. Fixing it entails more than just twisting copper wires together: after all, glass can’t be reattached so easily without splicing machines that melt the glass ends back together — with near-microscopic precision. This is a time-consuming, manpower-intensive, and localized process — hence the extended downtime, which some users are beginning to vent about on social media.
The Fallout for the Connected Home
In a place with high rates of remote work and some digital literacy, the disruption grinds life’s daily rhythm to a halt. Payments decline, Zoom calls vanish, and streaming resolutions get stuck in some kind of purgatory. As BSNL is a government-telecom behemoth, it has a huge presence in these southern states, and hence it has a pervasive effect on residential users as well as enterprises.
While the maintenance is described by its proponents as “essential” to avoid catastrophic failures in years to come, the short-term agony is intense. It is a humbling reminder that the modern, high-tech lives we lead are held up by a literal thread of glass lying only a few feet beneath the dirt.
