Signal dropping in West Cork

Deteriorating mobile phone coverage in areas of county Cork where coverage was previously good must be addressed by the Government, a West Cork councillor has said.

Independent Cllr Finbarr Harrington said mobile phone coverage has been getting progressively worse in parts of Cork over the past six months.

“These are places that have had good phone coverage in the past and for some reason the phone coverage has gone very poor there,” he told Monday’s meeting of Cork County Council.

He added: “Another issue that is reccurring is that, for no apparent reason, calls are being dropped in the middle of a conversation.”

Cllr Harrington said he had witnessed the frustrating issue many times first-hand and many of his constituents are having the same experience.

He said: “People are paying big money for phone bills, and they deserve a bit better. During the recent storms, mobile phones were the only form of communication many houses had. We had power out and we had phonelines broken,” added Mr Harrington.

He called on the council to write to Minister for Arts, Media, Communications, Culture and Sport, Patrick O’Donovan TD, and ask him to intervene on the issue.

Fellow West Cork Cllr, Danny Collins of Independent Ireland said he had been in touch with his own provider who said it could be a technical issue that can be solved by replacing existing SIM cards with new ones. He said this has worked for a few people but not for most. He was also advised to reset his network settings but said this made no difference to his phone.

He said: “In this day and age you should have phone service everywhere. Prior to this happening, you’d go into places like Durrus and other places throughout West Cork and other places in the county and you’d have no phone service. This shouldn’t be happening,” added Cllr Collins.

Fianna Fáil Cllr Gerard Patrick Murphy suggested ComReg, who are responsible for the regulation of the electronic communications sector, could step in on the issue. “There are so many mobile phone companies out there. Some of them have their own masts and some share masts and some don’t share. I think it should be compulsory that mobile phone operators should have access to all masts and that they share all these masts equally. If every company had access to every mast, then obviously the service would be that bit better.”