Statement from Turkcell CEO About Outages

On the fifth day of two major earthquakes in Kahramanmaraş, communication problems in the region still continue to be experienced. While the reactions towards GSM operators continued to grow, a critical interview was held today.

Turkcell CEO Murat Erkan made statements by participating in Cüneyt Özdemir’s broadcast. The highlights of the statements were as follows:

“If the network was down, access to social media apps would be at 0 point”

Murat Erkan touched upon the issue of saving many people from the rubble thanks to Twitter.We are praising an American company, we think that it is using people by using this network.” he said.

He replied to Cüneyt Özdemir’s comment, “You say, if it were not for us, people would have collapsed” as follows:

“I’m not saying that, I’m saying this. These applications would be at zero point (in terms of access) if the network had gone down. I don’t see zero. I even see an increase.”

“Our priority right now is to increase communication to an acceptable level”

“Our priority right now is not billing. Our priority right now is to increase communication to an acceptable level. Our problem is to solve the areas we control ourselves as soon as possible. I can’t solve the energy problem, I can’t open the way, I can’t make the airport work, I don’t have a bakery, I can’t produce bread.

If everyone does their own work first, we will get through this disaster much faster.”

“Sitting in your warm place and typing at the keyboard…”

“Whatever the citizens there have about us is on our heads. If they say less, let’s do more. Our thing here is really, the one who is sitting in his warm place at home and typing from the keyboard, doing whatever he wants.”

What happened to communication during the earthquake?

Erkan stated that there were 3,400 communication stations in the region until before the earthquake, and that at 04:17, the first earthquake occurred. they lost 1,600 of them explained. 260 of them were destroyed and became unusable. Nearly 1200 of these stations were brought back.

However, the stations could not be activated due to the lack of electricity in the area. Also, Turkcell employees operating in that area were also affected by the earthquake.

The CEO stated that they started to send a serious human resource to the region. He also stated that they took quick action to deliver the generators to the region quickly and deployed around 1300 generators to the region.

Dronecell descriptions:

“When we first started the project, we tested the project and saw that it is a serviceable product that can stay in the air for 30-35 minutes.”

Turkcell CEO, currently announced to take off the other day Aksungur UAV shared that they were able to increase this opportunity and service time to 50 hours. He also stated that the coverage area reached 50 kilometers.

“To say that I will solve it with a drone in an area of ​​110 thousand square kilometers, a person who knows this technology should not think about it. We developed the drone for use in a very specific area.”

Why are base stations on top of buildings? Has a lesson been learned from this earthquake?

“Mr. Cüneyt, network technology is such that you cannot communicate without a base station. Where should you put the base station? Where your customer can access it, see it.”

base stations whether to be placed in earthquake resistant buildings His response to the discussion was as follows:

“People live where we put our base stations. Our base stations are not valuable things from people. If a person enters that building, I need to be able to put a cell tower there.”

The CEO is out of town and not on top of the building, tower-shaped that only 2 of 34 base stations are unavailable shared.

No statement was made about future base stations and measures to be taken.