There are established procedures for reporting poor cellular service. Tying the carrier’s site technician to the tower is not one of them.
But in the case of a technician reportedly restrained by angry villagers in India over poor 5G service, the widely reported story may have a few loose ends — quite literally.
Technician Aditya Bhan Singh was reportedly confronted by residents of Hardauli in Uttar Pradesh’s Fatehpur district after arriving to address problems at a local cell site. Villagers said they had endured poor connectivity for nearly two years, frequently receiving unstable 4G service despite paying for 5G.
Their complaints, they said, had gone largely unanswered.
So when Singh arrived at the site and opened the unnamed carrier’s cabinet, villagers allegedly decided to escalate their complaint by tying him to the tower until company officials addressed their connectivity problems.
Video of the incident quickly spread across social media, producing the irresistible headline of an angry village effectively taking a tower technician hostage over bad 5G.
Except the video itself complicates that narrative.
A rather accommodating restraint
Singh is unquestionably shown with rope loosely wrapped around his torso and with his arms raised above his head near a diagonal tower brace. But the restraint around his hands appears considerably less secure than descriptions of a technician being “bound” might suggest.
The video, reviewed by Wireless Estimator, shows that at approximately the 29-second mark, Singh appears to pull one hand completely free from the rope around his raised hands.
Then comes the curious part.
Roughly a second later, rather than leaving the freed hand out, lowering his arm or attempting to remove himself from the remaining rope, he appears to deliberately slip the hand back beneath the rope and return it to essentially the same position.
The footage doesn’t prove that the confrontation was staged or that Singh willingly participated in being restrained. It also doesn’t establish what occurred before or after the portion captured on video.
But it certainly raises questions about just how securely the technician was being held at that point.
And there is another wrinkle.
The Times of India reported that unnamed sources claimed Singh himself may have suggested that villagers detain him so their longstanding complaints would finally reach senior officials at the telecommunications company.
Singh reportedly provided police with a different account, alleging that a villager encouraged others to restrain him.
That leaves an unusual question hanging over an already unusual story: Was this an actual forcible confinement, a frustrated village’s publicity stunt, or something somewhere in between?
The 5G complaint appears quite real
Whatever the circumstances surrounding the rope, the villagers’ complaints about their wireless service appear genuine.
Police Superintendent Abhimanyu Manglik said villagers claimed the area had suffered poor mobile connectivity, particularly 5G service, for nearly two years despite the installation of a private telecom tower.
Residents reportedly demonstrated their poor signal on phones while recording the confrontation and complained that repeated efforts to get the network problem corrected had failed.
Singh was not injured and was eventually freed. Police subsequently took action against villagers allegedly involved in the incident.
Ironically, the person who became the focus of their anger was reportedly the technician sent to work on the connectivity problem in the first place.
American tower technicians can probably appreciate that part.
They don’t determine spectrum allocations, network density, backhaul capacity, capital budgets or what a carrier’s marketing department promises customers. But when the phone says 5G and performs like something considerably less, the person standing next to the tower can become a convenient representative of the entire wireless network.
Fortunately, U.S. subscribers generally have a less hands-on escalation procedure.
And infrastructure contractors shouldn’t need to add “Residents may restrain technician until 5G performance improves” to their JHAs just yet.
Still, the Indian video suggests an appropriate control measure should the hazard ever arise:
If the rope is loose enough to remove your hand, don’t put it back.
For frustrated wireless customers on either side of the world, the recommended escalation procedure remains considerably simpler: Call the carrier. Open a trouble ticket. Leave the rope in the garage.
