Feature

Vodafone Cuts off Customers

Networks & Network Services
Last weekend Vodafone moved from cutting parts of their distribution network to cutting off their customers. A network blackout left parts of the UK without any mobile service for most of Sunday.
The Midlands, parts of the North-West and South-East, and North Wales were affected by the outage which was attributed to thieves trying to steal cabling in North Wales. Police are now investigating.

Major network downtime is becoming an annual occurrence for Vodafone. Around this time last year customers were unable to make any calls to phones on the Orange network. Voda's engineers quickly moved to solve the problem, but instead ended up completely cutting off Vodafone users who had numbers ported over from Orange.

Vodafone also suffered a complete outage in the South East in November 2004.

Orange themselves fell victim to gremlins last week when their broadband service went down for over 24 hours. An apparent "network equipment failure" affected customers on their Local Loop Unbundled (LLU) exchanges.