The blinking green light on a Wi-Fi router is a beacon of home for millions of households. It’s about being plugged in to work, entertainment and the outside world. Today, the beat of that heart stopped for a large part of western India — notably Mumbai, Pune and Ahmedabad. The telecom behemoth Reliance Jio, which almost single-handedly democratized high-speed internet in India — its service was a particular force of equalization at a time when the country had some of the lowest bandwidth costs worldwide — suffered from large-scale service disruptions that caused users to gaze forlornly at the nation’s most feared LED light: red.
The Physics of the Internet
To find out why your internet is down, you need to get away from the cloud and focus on the ground. We forget, in many ways, that the internet is physical. It zooms through hair-thin glass fibers that are underground and strung along power lines. Those cables carry pulses of light to your home with data.
The ISP said the disturbance was a result of “localized fiber maintenance work.” This is the polite term in telecommunication; the physical infrastructure was compromised. That might mean road crews accidentally sliced the cable bundle (a depressingly frequent mishap known as a “fiber cut”) or it might mean necessary upgrades that required equipment to be turned off. The data traffic backs up like a blocked or severed main artery. Packets of information attempting to flow from Netflix’s servers to your TV get stuck, leading to endless buffering or worse: a total blackout.
The WFH Impact
Adding to the frustration was that it happened during business hours. As we move into a post-pandemic world, broadband cannot be considered a luxury; it is now an essential utility, as necessary to quality of life as reliable electricity. Two hours without YouTube in Mumbai is not just two hours without YouTube; it’s also dropped Zoom calls, stopped stock trading and delayed submitted projects.
Thomas’ users flocked to Twitter (now X) to let off steam, and a cycle of outrage got its wind. This is a reaction to the unbelievable amount of pressure put on every ISP (Internet Service Provider) to have 100% uptime. A power cut can be survived by lighting a candle and waiting; not so the internet cut, which leaves modern productivity dead in its tracks.
Rerouting the Traffic
So, how does it get fixed? You can’t just flip a switch. If the problem is a physical cut, a squad of engineers must travel to the spot and dig up the cable, then splice the glass fibers back together again carefully enough that whatever signaling information is passing through does not get lost. It is manual, difficult labor.
If the problem is bugs in software that caused maintenance logic errors, network engineers have to redirect traffic. Picture a highway shut down for construction. The traffic police (the routers, in this case) must send all of the cars (in this case, the data) onto a smaller side road. And that is why, despite a connection today, it might have been ridiculously slow. The other suppliers were clogged with everyone’s data piling through at the same time. Sponsored Eventually, speed will be as good as it was, once Jio gets a grip on the network, but today has been a gritty reminder of how we’re all slaves to those flimsy glass threads under the tarmac.
