spark services limit skinny

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kaihoka

164 posts

Master Geek

#185682 1-Dec-2015 17:30

i live in a rural area where a lot of my neighbors and i have skinny, it is the closest thing to free calling we have.
there is no adsl internet within 20klm.
on the weekend 21/22 nov spark upgraded the one and only spark tower in our area.
since then i and my neighbors have noticed a big drop in service by at least 2 bars which is significant in the country, where that might be all you have.
calls are dropping out and internet is as slow as a 28 k modem .
there is now no signal where we have had signal for at least 10 years.
i rang skinny who said they could not control what spark did on sparks tower, so i rang spark to see would they could do.
spark would not help me because i had a skinny no.
so back to skinny and round and round.
we are remote rural with a small population.
spark may not even care what alcatal-lucent did to the cell tower, as most of the population live on the other side of the hill and the signal seems ok there.
they may be going to upgrade to 4G and have only half finished the job, who knows.
we would just like to know if it can be fixed
or do we have to switch to vodafone

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3916 posts

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#1438766 1-Dec-2015 17:45

The name of your town/settlement would be really helpful!

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sbiddle

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#1438770 1-Dec-2015 18:03

My pick would be the site has new panels which offer a different coverage footprint. There potentially exists a very high chance that there is nothing anybody can actually do to revert things back to normal, it would really depend on what changes have been made.

coffeebaron

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#1438786 1-Dec-2015 18:15

Also allow some time for the site to optimise, you may still see signal return. Whether or not that will be as good as before I guess is a bit unknown.

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kaihoka

164 posts

Master Geek

#1438793 1-Dec-2015 18:25

Zeon: The name of your town/settlement would be really helpful!

sorry i forgot to mention that.
it is the mnt burnet tower in tasman district

martyyn

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#1438797 1-Dec-2015 18:30

This is interesting because I'm going through the exact same problem in Otaki Beach. Up until 3 weeks ago we had fantastic coverage on Skinny/XT but since then almost my entire house/section no longer has a signal my phone can keep hold of. Every single call I've made or received in that time has been dropped.

My neighbour has moved from XT because she has absolutely no signal on any part of her section and doesn't have a landline.

Skinny say I'm in a good zone with no known problems and Spark don't want to know (which is fair enough).

kaihoka

164 posts

Master Geek

#1438798 1-Dec-2015 18:32

sbiddle: My pick would be the site has new panels which offer a different coverage footprint. There potentially exists a very high chance that there is nothing anybody can actually do to revert things back to normal, it would really depend on what changes have been made.

thats what i was thinking .
i do not think it will change until we get 4G.
the GIS map shows a new licence for the 700 lte from this november.
but they may not finish the job for at least 6 months
so its vodafone for us then

kaihoka

164 posts

Master Geek

#1438802 1-Dec-2015 18:47

martyyn: This is interesting because I'm going through the exact same problem in Otaki Beach. Up until 3 weeks ago we had fantastic coverage on Skinny/XT but since then almost my entire house/section no longer has a signal my phone can keep hold of. Every single call I've made or received in that time has been dropped.

My neighbour has moved from XT because she has absolutely no signal on any part of her section and doesn't have a landline.

Skinny say I'm in a good zone with no known problems and Spark don't want to know (which is fair enough).

spark has been upgrading lots of towers lately.
when we lost signal on sat 21st i looked on the spark web site and saw a list of towers they were working on that day and the next ,and constantly , looking at the updated info on there site
Because signal was still not back on sunday, i rung spark.
maybe because they were so late getting signal connected again, they talked to me and mentioned that it was alactal- lucent who was doing the work.
and it was their fault.
so i looked up alcatal and what they did to towers and i thought ,are probably putting in a whole new infrastructure for 4G.
i presume your tower does not support that yet.
this upgrade will work very well for some people, just you and i are not among them

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michaelmurfy

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#1438842 1-Dec-2015 20:16

I see the same happened to the Wakefield, Nelson tower however my parents still have good coverage out where they are (around 8km outside of Wakefield) so it doesn't appear the upgrade affected them. According to gis.geek.nz the tower "has" 700MHz 4G now.

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kaihoka

164 posts

Master Geek

#1438956 1-Dec-2015 22:51

It seems what ever spark is doing to upgrade their towers for 4G is causing collateral damage to the previously robust 3G signal in some of the outer coverage areas

nigelj

856 posts

Ultimate Geek

#1438961 1-Dec-2015 23:06

kaihoka:
Zeon: The name of your town/settlement would be really helpful!

sorry i forgot to mention that.
it is the mnt burnet tower in tasman district

Looks like another outage scheduled for the 3rd...

Thursday 3rd December We’ll be making some changes to the Mobile network today in the following regions. Outage times vary between regions. Please see below for further timings

Tasman, Mapua (between 7am – 6pm)
Tasman, Mt Burnett (between 10pm – 6am)
Marlborough, Rahotia (between 7am – 12pm)
Tasman, Rakopi (between 1pm – 6pm)
Customers may experience connectivity issues or a “No Service” message on their mobile during this time.

Source

See if it works/improves after Thursday night maybe?

michaelmurfy

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#1438966 1-Dec-2015 23:34

So talking to my father he said service dropped off on Saturday through to Sunday evening (2 stage upgrade) - he just had to stand outside to get coverage. I'd say this might be your case too. Service has 100% returned to my parents now that the work has been completed on their local cell site.

kaihoka

164 posts

Master Geek

#1438969 1-Dec-2015 23:43

nigelj:
kaihoka:
Zeon: The name of your town/settlement would be really helpful!

sorry i forgot to mention that.
it is the mnt burnet tower in tasman district

Looks like another outage scheduled for the 3rd...

Thursday 3rd December We’ll be making some changes to the Mobile network today in the following regions. Outage times vary between regions. Please see below for further timings

Tasman, Mapua (between 7am – 6pm)
Tasman, Mt Burnett (between 10pm – 6am)
Marlborough, Rahotia (between 7am – 12pm)
Tasman, Rakopi (between 1pm – 6pm)
Customers may experience connectivity issues or a “No Service” message on their mobile during this time.

Source

See if it works/improves after Thursday night maybe?

hey thanks for that , i had not checked their site for a few days.
i hope it fixes it too !.
the tasman rakopi tower is a mystery. there is no tower there.
rakopi is west of mnt burnet and the next tower west of mnt burnet is in australia.
it could be a name for the area a particular antenna covers, because this is where coverage has been badly affected
i have good voda signal and am on RBI but most of my neighbours are not so lucky.
i also have a separate vodafone phone and they always let me know if there is work being done on the tower that could affect my signal.
but there is never any thing from skinny or spark

kaihoka

164 posts

Master Geek

#1438970 1-Dec-2015 23:45

michaelmurfy: So talking to my father he said service dropped off on Saturday through to Sunday evening (2 stage upgrade) - he just had to stand outside to get coverage. I'd say this might be your case too. Service has 100% returned to my parents now that the work has been completed on their local cell site.

it seems reading further postings that we will be getting fixed on thursday night too

kaihoka

164 posts

Master Geek

#1440911 5-Dec-2015 10:38

sbiddle: My pick would be the site has new panels which offer a different coverage footprint. There potentially exists a very high chance that there is nothing anybody can actually do to revert things back to normal, it would really depend on what changes have been made.

an update on my tower.
after 2 weeks of crashed signal and numerous phone calls and complaints from the local community it was sorted yesterday.
we now have 4G, which is fantastic.
but i am puzzled by sparks complete non communication of what they were doing.
a few of us asked if they were upgrading to 4G and they said they had no plans.
even 3 hours before 4G came stream on spark said they had no plans to upgrade to 4G.
if spark had told the community, we are upgrading to 4G so for the next 2 weeks you notice problems with your signal.
we all would have just waited patiently

LivingSkinny

513 posts

Ultimate Geek

Trusted

Skinny

#1440934 5-Dec-2015 11:53

kaihoka: i live in a rural area where a lot of my neighbors and i have skinny, it is the closest thing to free calling we have.
there is no adsl internet within 20klm.
on the weekend 21/22 nov spark upgraded the one and only spark tower in our area.
since then i and my neighbors have noticed a big drop in service by at least 2 bars which is significant in the country, where that might be all you have.
calls are dropping out and internet is as slow as a 28 k modem .
there is now no signal where we have had signal for at least 10 years.
i rang skinny who said they could not control what spark did on sparks tower, so i rang spark to see would they could do.
spark would not help me because i had a skinny no.
so back to skinny and round and round.
we are remote rural with a small population.
spark may not even care what alcatal-lucent did to the cell tower, as most of the population live on the other side of the hill and the signal seems ok there.
they may be going to upgrade to 4G and have only half finished the job, who knows.
we would just like to know if it can be fixed
or do we have to switch to vodafone

Hi

I've passed this thread onto the Spark coverage team to look into.

Cheers

Paul

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