Consumers will be able to report problems with electricity offline: anti-crisis solutions from the Ministry of Digital

The joke about Abraham Maslow’s updated pyramid is becoming less and less funny, because the situation where we cannot fulfill any level of our needs due to dependence on electricity is becoming more and more depressing. Food in refrigerators spoils, water in taps disappears, communication with relatives and friends is limited by a number of technical problems. What can we say about professional and personal realization. We are all energy dependent, because this is how modern urban life is structured.

However, life in the network continues even when the electricity goes out. Ukrainians are switching to the mobile Internet en masse, and its quality drops significantly from such overly active “using”. Who among us is not familiar with a situation with a disconnection, when Wi-Fi is down due to a lack of light, and attempts to view news on a gadget end in an endless download of the first page?

What can we say about the unavailability of mobile communication as such, when you need to find out about the health of loved ones, call an ambulance, the police or some other emergency services if necessary. On the other hand, the lack of electricity does not mean that Ukrainians should find themselves in a communication vacuum.

So the Ministry of Digitization made an attempt to solve this problem by reorganizing the work of mobile operators.

Less than two weeks have passed since President Zelensky instructed Deputy Prime Minister Fedorov to deal with the communication operators, and he has already presented his “road map” for getting out of the communication and technology crisis.

“Outages should not affect people’s basic life needs. Even if there is no power, Ukrainians should be able to call an ambulance or the police, write to their relatives or receive a notification of an air alert,” Fedorov wrote in his Telegram channels.

From what the Ministry of Statistics has already adopted:

There is a decision to update the requirements of the National Control Center for mobile operators. They now have to provide 25% of the grid with generators to run 72+ hours without power. At the same time, the rest of the mobile network should work for 10 hours on rechargeable batteries. Accumulators should work according to the power bank principle, i.e. power the base stations during power outages.

There is also an intention to strengthen compliance checks. Operators will give quarterly updates on the situation of the National Center of Ukraine, and NKEK will check them.

The Ministry of Digital has developed resolution No. 352, which has already been adopted by the regulator. Thus, operators will be able to submit an application to Oblenergo for the institution to modernize its networks that go to base stations. This will allow you to charge the batteries faster. However, we remember that it still takes time to charge the batteries.

The Ministry of Statistics also agreed on a list of facilities that must have uninterrupted power supply. It is assumed that the regional military administrations will hand it over to Oblenergo.

An important step is also the adoption of the draft law on the abolition of customs duties and VAT on the import of batteries and generators.

The Ministry of Digital Transformation is also working on the reservation of conscripted employees of repair crews, because it is these specialists who are the first to resume work after the attacks on energy facilities and the failure of base stations. Therefore, in order for the network to work stably, the workers of the repair teams must continue to work at their places.

Earlier in the Ministry already reported about the successful online booking through Diya of more than 55,000 employees of critical enterprises.

Currently, the Ministry of Digital Affairs promises that consumers will be able to report problems with communication to Diya, even when they are offline. It is planned that when the connection is restored, the information will be pulled up, experts will analyze the feedback and work on stabilizing the connection further.