Poor battery backup times for local MTN tower.

[Hectic]

Our local MTN tower has backup capacity for about 90 minutes.
The Vodacom Tower last several hours more, I think about 6 - 8 hours, but I'm not hundred percent sure.

Seeing that our loadshed periods are dealt with in two and a half hours batches and the latest increase in MTN prices included additional backup due to loadshedding, I think 90 minutes of backup power is ridiculous and that another 60 - 90 minutes would be a more relevant time frame.

We also have 3 contract phones with MTN for many, many years and we are not interested to move to another service provider.

Could someone advise me what the best way would be to apply for additional backup power and to whom should I address the application?

 

[eddief1]

The only way I see you sorting this out is to pay someone to steal the current batteries forcing them to replace them with new ones lol :wtf:

On a more serious note...This just shows you how vulnerable the mobile networks are when looking at a long blackouts. My advise is to bi&^% enough to MTN and maybe they will sort it out in 3 years

 

[Hectic]

I did receive a PM that seem to indictate that there is a possibility that this will be sorted out tomorrow, if not, I will steel the current batteries.

 

[eddief1]

I did receive a PM that seem to indictate that there is a possibility that this will be sorted out tomorrow, if not, I will steel the current batteries.

Now that is service I really did not expect! Good on MTN taking this seriously!

 

[supersunbird]

Our local MTN tower has backup capacity for about 90 minutes.
The Vodacom Tower last several hours more, I think about 6 - 8 hours, but I'm not hundred percent sure.

Seeing that our loadshed periods are dealt with in two and a half hours batches and the latest increase in MTN prices included additional backup due to loadshedding, I think 90 minutes of backup power is ridiculous and that another 60 - 90 minutes would be a more relevant time frame.

We also have 3 contract phones with MTN for many, many years and we are not interested to move to another service provider.

Could someone advise me what the best way would be to apply for additional backup power and to whom should I address the application?

That's hectic... Hectic :erm:

 

[Arthur]

Eish. This load shedding sure is messing up the country's infrastructure. Eina.

 

[Hectic]

Thx MTN.
Apparently the two towers for our area have been upgraded today.

 

[ECape]

Thanks MTN

 

[Hemi300c]

Our tower for MTN gives a pretty strong Edge signal but when power goes off this drops to 10% and lasts for about 90min then dead.

 

[Hectic]

Apparently the new back up solution should give us 4 hours or more.

 

[HavocXphere]

90 mins does sound unusually low. You do get differences in how long towers last though - they're planned like that unfortunately (well logically...).

Some key towers will never ever go down. e.g. key sandton towers...they'll run them on UPS + diesel generators & resupply them with diesel for however long they have to. Others have UPS plus a bit of diesel gen capacity (that'll get topped up whenever they get around to it). And finally there are towers backed by UPS only.

[Speculation] From what I can tell they seem to use a bit of a chequered pattern - i.e. If you're willing to lose 3G & HSDPA and go for edge/voice only then you can lose every 2nd tower and still get something resembling decent coverage. (edge has more range). That plus the amount of revenue/key customers in the area seems to determine policy (i.e. They'll drop small dorpies happily but Sandton will stay)

One thing I'm 100% sure about though is that these things are planned very flippin carefully...they don't just guess. Well VC and MTN anyway...VC being the best in my experience in planning their sht right.