Nearly 65 lakh mobile phone users in the Kashmir Valley have failed to access the 301 “white-listed” websites through 2G connectivity restored two days ago after five-and-a-half months.
Network experts say the 2G technology is “incompatible with most dynamic websites”.
“2G is an obsolete technology. It was meant to access static websites and is completely incompatible with modern-day data-heavy dynamic websites,” Maroof Naieem Qadri, Director, IT, Kashmir University, told The Hindu.
Referring to the “whitelisted” sites of education allowed to access, especially those used by scholars, Mr. Qadri said it was almost impossible to retrieve high-data files from these websites. Mr. Qadri said the biggest trouble was for those who intended to make online payments on 2G technology.
“On a payment gateway, a user should be able to retrieve a certain amount of data within a time period. On 2G, it’s not possible to retrieve the data and a user may be logged out from the sessions repeatedly, making it impossible to pay online,” said Dr. Qadri, who himself failed to make a payment on makemytrip.com, a “whitelisted” site.
2G connectivity, restored on January 25 and barred again on January 26 for security reasons, works in bits and pieces in the Valley, people say.
Nazir Ahmad, an Airtel user, complained that he received a message on Monday morning: “Dear customer, as per the government order, the Internet facility has been temporarily stopped in your area.”
Scores of users fail to even connect with gmail and those who are lucky to connect fail to download any attachments. Tahoor Ahmad, a student at a Srinagar coaching centre, said he was unable to download the NEET syllabus of 2020 despite repeated attempts.
In a jibe at the Internet network, a local cartoonist, Bashir Ahmad Bashir, in a page one cartoon in Urdu daily Srinagar Times showed a Kashmiri waiting with a stair to climb a black wall to reach his cellphone.
Athar Parvaiz, a freelance journalist, said one can gauge the scenario the people of J&K are grappling with from the fact that the Internet speed is 85kbps with access to only 300 of over 1.4 billion websites, even as the average mobile speed in the world is 6.8 Mbps and the broadband Internet speed is 11.3 Mbps.
All fixed lines broadband services remain barred in Kashmir since the August 5 move to revoke J&K’s special status. All the social media platforms remain inaccessible by the government order.
