Outages affect cellphones

Concerned farmer writes: THIS Eskom crisis is causing issues in all kinds of areas that we wouldn’t expect.

We have been experiencing regular “down time” on our cellphones since the power outages started. I wonder how many people are affected by this – most people I have spoken to recently didn’t make a con- nection between the intermittent interruption to their cellphone signal and the fact that there was, or had recently been, a power outage.

It is becoming increasingly difficult to run a business under these conditions, especially in tourism where we receive almost all our bookings by phone.

Farmers mostly rely on their cellphones for security now too, most having given up on landlines because of constant down time due to cable theft.

Local farmers regularly send and receive texts with neighbouring farms concerning security issues, and the cellphone would be a literal “lifeline” if there was a serious security issue.

I don’t know if the service providers are already making plans to provide their customers with good service despite the ongoing load-shedding – like installing solar panels or generators to keep the tower batteries “topped up” when the power is out, resulting in less down time for the customers.

The most likely scenario is that they may not see the need – unless the customers let them know they are not happy with the down time experienced!

For this reason, I wanted to ask if TotT would encourage readers to visit the MTN/Vodacom/Cell C webpage and report the fault/down time online, so that the companies might be motivated to make the necessary improvements.