Network Again

[colinstone]

This morning in OX2 0DA, the 4G network dropped off.  This occasionally happens and after a minute or so, it comes back up.  Today it stayed off.  I hadn't received any notification text message.

On calling 191 I received the usual apologies, so sorry etc etc and eventually was told that the mast at OX2 0DP was down for upgrade.  This mast had been worked on Aug 23 - Feb 24.  I then contacted Vf Social Media Team and received similar platitudes and:

"Hope you're doing well. I understand your concern and can see that we’re carrying out maintenance in this area at the moment to help improve our mobile network."  and "Maintenance is due to be finished by 20:00 03 May 2024 and we’ll update our website page as soon as it has been done."

This afternoon I wandered along to the mast, 500m away, and found a team of painters doing a re-paint job of the actual pylon structure.  The network had been switched off for safety reasons to stop electromagnetic radiation exposure to the painters.  The network would be back on at 1700 or so and off again tomorrow morning.  This will happen each day this week.

So all perfectly reasonable and understandable.

So why is it totally beyond Vodafone staff to be able to explain the ground truth??

[Despair21]

In my experience, Vodafone have decimated the connectivity to 4G for data! Originally, I could easily download at 80mbs (when 4G was introduced), now I'm lucky if I can download at all, especially during peak hours! Customer services deem this as an acceptable level of service! Furthermore, after addressing this issue almost monthly for the past two years, I've given up! It's obvious to anyone it's the 'contention' on the line! However, Vodafone do not seem to have increased the network capacity to compensate for this issue, especially eversince the cessation of their 3G service, which undoubtedly increased data traffic on the 4G service, hence compounding the issue. Hope this helps to explain somewhat. 

[japitts]

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@colinstone wrote:

So why is it totally beyond Vodafone staff to be able to explain the ground truth??

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Frontline CS are broadly geared towards customers who just want their phones to work, and have no interest in the technical details. Planned works such as this will have a "Change Request" associated with it, which feeds into the various CRM systems.

That change request will have an outage window associated with it, which is the most CS will have visibility of. It may even be that the outage window doesn't include overnight restoration.

The impact an individual site outage has, will also depend on the network grid and coverage planning in that area - very often you can get away with a site outage without any major degradation being noticeable, in other cases it will cause a complete loss of service in some locations.