Taxi Driver Online

Hope no-ones PDA's run on Vodaphone, whole networks been down since 00:05am still not fully back up at 6am. Our credit card terminals are on the network and no-ones been able to use them all night. Just great on a New Years Eve.

Well Sasha, we must have the most considerate customers in the country then because we only got one issue reported on New Year and although it was indeed a Voda problem, it appeared to be local and only affected a certain number of their vehicles.

We’ve genuinely never seen any issues with PDAs over the New Year period and why would we because the data side of things is no busier then than at any other busy weekend evening? The text side of things falls over quite badly but people these days know not to rely on texts during New Year.

If you think that was bad though, then spare a thought for two of our companies who had an even worst time. One small company was broken into and had all the equipment stolen while another had the building they were in completely burnt down.

I'm on vodaphone and have been doing private hire work off it recently.It was down from 00.00hrs 1/1/13 for at least 9 hours and cocked me up totally.I had to go into the big city(sheffield) and fight not just with the expected ph but, my so called collegues who are becoming more and more like hungry wolves with no morals or scruples or standards,or any f...kin thing!

Vodafone was off in the Borders as well for nearly 4 days, folk could only text through them.
I had loads of customers saying they tried to call, I asked them what network and they said voda, the thing was there phones where showing a full signal????
BT was a bit iffy for a few hours as well on Monday morning

Bill, out of interest how many of your customers are on Vodafone and in which part of the country ?

Looking at a few voda forums it seems the whole network went down in the North of England and Scotland, voice, data, texts - the whole lot.

It goes to show how fragile dependance on a single network is. There's always going to be localised outages on all the networks at some point but these usually only last a few minutes or hours. In this case it wasn't confined to a small area and was off for over 7 hours. It's been discussed in another thread but businesses (not just ours) should have some sort of backup plan in place should such an outage occur, particularly when relying on a mobile phone signal for PDA's and credit card machines etc. Perhaps dual sims the way to go ?

Sasha

I can’t give you and exact number but we are talking thousands of Voda connections and they’re spread pretty much right across the UK. After reading your post though, I did check various forums and did see people saying they couldn’t make a call or send texts. But as I said, we only saw the one isolated incident in West Yorkshire and it was literally just a handful of drivers who apparently had their devices locked to 3G.

I wouldn't quite describe the networks as fragile but they can and do break occasionally and when they do they can affect a lot of people. But Vodafone isn’t a singularity and just like the Internet you might have some problems but you can’t break it completely. Signals from each mast go over lots of different internal network routes and a failure on any one of these can affect one part of the service while leaving other parts untouched.

I think what happened on New Year could have been just the 3G side of things failing due to the demand as millions used mobile social networking to send their New Year messages rather than texting. All these smart phones use 3G for speed but our taxi stuff doesn’t need this so we plump for the more stable 2G network. 3G can be patchy at times but it doesn’t break that often, in fact, if the 2G ever fails us, then we can just switch to 3G until it’s fixed and that’s saved our bacon many a time. A dual sim device though as you say is a much better option and now that the prices have dropped more will be going down this line.

Cheers Bill that's cleared things up.

I thought the whole network had gone down, looks like the 2G side was still working though.