You Can't hear us now!

For the second time in less than a week, the CityWest cellular system in Prince Rupert has left many of its customers less than happy with their service.

On Saturday, during the height of the Seafest activities in the afternoon, the CityWest cellular platform appears to have suffered another form of a breakdown, leaving many of the city's residents unable to keep in contact with others on the CityWest system.

With crowds numbering in the thousands downtown taking part in the various activities, there was little chance to keep in touch or update friends and families about activities or locations, a situation that attracted a number of locals to the hackingthemainframe site to express their dissatisfaction with the growing inconvenience.

On Wednesday, a similar outage took place between noon and four pm, leaving Citywest customers without service and without much in the way of answers, but for a short advisory that they were working on the problem.

Saturday, there did not appear to be a similar explanation, and with business hours restricted to a Monday to Friday operation, there was but only a telephone link with CityWest to try and learn more about the outages, though information it appears was not plentiful.

Last year, CityWest, which is owned by the City of Prince Rupert, trumpeted the importance of its alliance with Northwestel as part of the larger Bell mobility system for service delivery, during their Wednesday outage they outlined on their website that they were endeavouring to "take steps with partner carriers to ensure that this kind of outage would be avoided in the future."

With Saturday's outage still fresh in their mind for Monday morning, Rupertites that currently remain with CityWest are no doubt hoping that the pace of those "steps with their partner carriers" quickens and that the outages begin to be but bad memories.
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Short of that, perhaps just keeping the customers better informed about service disruptions, their causes and solutions might help keep CityWest customers loyal in the very competitive cel phone business.

Otherwise, judging by some of the tone of the local chat board from the last few days, the exodus from CityWest may soon be on.

Can you hear them now?

They don't quite yell out "it wasn't our fault", but CityWest did offer up a slight hint as to what happened to their cel phone service yesterday.

Cellular service for CityWest customers had a four hour blackout period on Wednesday, as apparent troubles with "partner" organizations resulted in a lack of communication abilities for cel phone users.

The service which went down shortly after the noon hour did not resume again until after 4 pm, leaving business and residential cel phone users scrambling for other modes of communication or perhaps giving thought to seeking out other cel phone operators available in the city.

The CityWest website while not exactly overflowing with information outlining the nature of their cellular problems, did seem to suggest that the problem was related to other service providers affiliated with the local telecommunications company.

Cellular Service Restored

Please be advised that cellular service has now been restored in Prince Rupert. This outage lasted for just under 4 hours. We are taking steps with partner carriers to ensure that this kind of outage would be avoided in future.

Thank you for your patience.

The four hour inconvenience at an end, normally chatty Rupertites were back with their phones to their ears, comparing notes about their sudden return to the Dark ages of communications.