O2 branded ‘abysmal’ after finally reconnecting Portgordon to mobile network after outage lasting months
A Moray community left without a mobile signal for weeks has finally been reconnected.
O2 had been slammed for leaving many Portgordon residents high and dry after their mast at the west end of the village stopped functioning following a storm at the start of August.
The Banffshire featured the plight of a disabled and ill pensioner who was left hanging for three and a half hours while a friend and a carer tried desperately to get enough of a signal to complete a 999 call. With no other signal source apart from the non-functioning mast, they were unable to access emergency network access to make their call.
The villagers’ plight prompted Aberdeenshire North and Moray East MP Seamus Logan to write to O2’s Chief Operations Officer Rob Orr to demand action.
After weeks of frustration, Mr Logan has received confirmation from the firm that their service is now fully restored in Portgordon and surrounding area.
O2 told the MP that repairs have been completed on the mast, damaged during Storm Floris. They have confirmed that their network engineering team will continue to closely monitor the network in this area to ensure it remains stable, following these extensive repair works.
Mr Logan said: “I am pleased that this matter is now resolved and that O2 has responded quickly to my request for urgent action to be taken.
“Customers in the village should now be able to rely on their mobile service which is so important to their personal, educational, work and business lives.
“O2 have also asked me to relay to their customers that in regard to emergency calling, it’s worth noting that in an emergency, 999/111 calls can be connected when no network signal is available from O2 as the device should automatically roam/connect to the nearest available signal from any mobile provider.
“Emergency calls also take priority over ordinary mobile calls which means that, even with limited capacity or coverage, an emergency call is more likely to be successful.”
It was more than an inconvenience for 81-year-old Garden Lane resident Eric Geekie, who suffers from a range of serious ailments, including Parkinson’s, diabetes, low blood pressure, limited mobility and low oxygen and has been admitted to hospital numerous times.
Neighbour Maureen Burrows was on hand to help Mr Geekie following a fall but there was a hugely stressful wait for the pensioner while she and a carer spent hours trying to get enough of a signal to summon the medical attention he desperately needed.
In addition to this, the lack of signal left Eric isolated as he was unable to access Facebook and other apps he likes to use on his phone, or even order the special meals he sources online.
While grateful to see service restored, Mrs Burrows remains less than impressed with O2’s overall response.
She continued: “Thankfully we are back up and running but I do think the service from O2 has been abysmal and the robotic replies that you receive, when they remembered to send them, are very infuriating.
“I’m not convinced the reason they gave for the delay was that they had to obtain a road closure because it’s just a small track through the farm and into a field!
“I see Vodafone had an outage of 130,000 across the UK and they managed to get it fixed within two days. Why the hell did it take O2 two months?
“You do begin to get the general feeling that as we are a small community up in the north-east of Scotland we do not matter and throughout the whole thing O2 never once mentioned reducing our bill to compensate for not being able to use the phone, though we did get a slight reduction through Sky.
“Eric certainly is happy to have his services back up and running and there is a sense of relief that at least if anything happens again in the future we should be able to get help more quickly.”