Cell Phones in Great Britain - Vodafone appears to be completely broken

Author

Vodafone appears to be completely broken

Tony Walton

2007-03-18, 4:33 am

Phone out from a Voda phone to any number (Voda, landline, other
mobile) and see "Number error". Try to phone in to a Voda number and
get various "Fault" messages.

This has been going on since Friday (16th March) evening in North
London (Oxhey switching centre).

After several tries to reach customer "services", most of which ended
with the usual Vodafone helpful "Thank you for calling, please
disconnect" message, I got through to some prat who informed me there
was a "fault" (no shit, Sherlock), could not tell me any timescale for
a fix, informed me that "engineering staff are not customer facing"
(whatever that means in English, presumably "they don't talk to the
people who pay their wages") and hung up on me when I asked to speak to
a supervisor.

Nice one, Vodafone.

The outage continues, Has anyone out there any clue what's actually going on?

--
Tony

Charlie Mitchell

2007-03-18, 4:33 am

>
> Nice one, Vodafone.
>
> The outage continues, Has anyone out there any clue what's actually
> going on?
>

There's a major outage with 2 of the HLR's.

The reason they hung up on you was probably because the poor
advisor has had nothing but people shouting at him/her all day
asking questions he doesn't have the answers to. Engineering
staff don't talk to customers for the simple reason being,
would you rather they were wasting time speaking to you, or
trying to come up with a resolution to the problem you're
having? Do you think any faults would ever be fixed if the
engineers started giving out their direct numbers to the
public?

What further information would a supervisor be able to give
you that the advisor can't? Do you think the supervisor would
have had some extra magic information that would fix your
phone? Trust me, in places like call centres, the front line
staff normally know more than the team leaders, who are there
to do exactly that, manage the team.

The only thing that would resolve your fault in a situation
like this is to have your phone number changed, each bank of
numbers is allocated to a different HLR so you'd need to ask
the advisor to give you a phone number on a HLR that isn't
down. Before you ask, no it's not possible to get your old
number back when it's fixed!!

I hope this helps, at the end of the day, it's technology and
technology goes tits up at the best of times.

Tony Walton

2007-03-18, 10:33 am

On 2007-03-17 23:50:53 +0000, Charlie Mitchell <jm2@charleem.co.uk> said:

>
>
> There's a major outage with 2 of the HLR's.

Thanks.

Rest snipped as being just as irrelevant as my rant was.

--
Tony

Simon Dobson

2007-03-18, 3:33 pm

Charlie Mitchell wrote:
>
> The only thing that would resolve your fault in a situation
> like this is to have your phone number changed, each bank of
> numbers is allocated to a different HLR so you'd need to ask
> the advisor to give you a phone number on a HLR that isn't
> down.

Isn't it SIM's/IMSI's that are allocated to HLR's? A change of mobile
number wouldn't help with an HLR issue?

bet no one

2007-03-24, 7:33 am

"Simon Dobson" <replytogroup@nospam.domain.invalid> wrote in message
news:565g5iF27q8euU1
@mid.individual.net...
> Charlie Mitchell wrote:
>
> Isn't it SIM's/IMSI's that are allocated to HLR's? A change of mobile
> number wouldn't help with an HLR issue?

It depends on the network. All networks that I know of have a specific set
of telephone number ranges for each HLR. Some networks (not Vodafone UK),
have specific ranges of SIMs/IMSIs for each HLR too.

regards,
Bet

Neil - Usenet

2007-03-24, 12:33 pm

"bet no one" <do.not.email@answer.in.the.newsgroup> wrote in message
news:x64Nh.20361$267.2361@newsfe6-gui.ntli.net...
>
> "Simon Dobson" <replytogroup@nospam.domain.invalid> wrote in message
> news:565g5iF27q8euU1
@mid.individual.net...
>
> It depends on the network. All networks that I know of have a specific
> set of telephone number ranges for each HLR. Some networks (not Vodafone
> UK), have specific ranges of SIMs/IMSIs for each HLR too.
>
> regards,
> Bet
>

im sure orange do hlr allocations by sim imsi only.

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