Customers of mobile operators O2 and Vodafone in the West Yorkshire (England) village of Cullingworth have struggled to get a usable network service for over a month after one of Cornerstone’s (CTIL) local masts suffered a power cut. But a “safety related defect on the structure” appears to be delaying repairs.
The mast in question (eNB 522652), which is pictured on this article, went offline on 2nd October 2024 and has remained down since then – causing some degree of anger among local residents. In response, both operators notified their customers, via a text message (presumably received by those with Wi-Fi Calling enabled or when connecting to a different site), that the “a phone mast close to you isn’t working“.
The notice went on to say that the operators have “got essential work to do” on the mast and were “in the process of gaining permission to get on the site to fix things“. But the wait has now gone on for longer than a month, and residents have been left to scratch their heads as to the reason for the slow progress. Until now.
A Vodafone Spokesperson told ISPreview:
“We’re sorry to our customers who are affected by issues with their services. Our networks team have been unable to access the site since the outage was reported due to the ongoing management of a safety related defect on the structure.
We’re working hard to restore services as soon as possible. We encourage our customers to sign up to Network Checker to receive status updates regarding network issues.”
Vodafone hasn’t detailed precisely what the “safety related defect” actually is, although we understand that work to restore the local mobile service is currently underway and due to finish on 11th November. But this assumes that no nasty weather events get in the way of being able to safely conduct the repairs (the original notification promised an update for 12th November).
Credits to forum member Bubbles121 for taking the picture and granting ISPreview permission to use it.