Have not had cell service all afternoon. Anyone else?
Cell’s ringing … seems okay here.
Yup, mine’s just fine. (ah never mind, mine’s on the Rogers network)
What kind of phone do you have?
Citywest Cell phones are not working. 
mines still not working…does anyone know for how long? 
Some problem stemming from all the way to White Horse I think. They have announced in on the radio and stated they are on it. Who knows how long it will take.
City West is sure having more than it’s share of service issues with cell service again…
Weird. I hope you get it sorted out. My CityWest cell is working just fine.
Mine is also citytel and working fine all day
Went down to the office and was told their entire cell network went down just before noon due to a severed line. Finally got service back around 4pm.
Yep I tried to use my phone just before noon and there was no service what-so-ever, and it didn’t return until sometime after 4. I called CityWest shortly after 1 to see if it was just me, but there was a lovely little message on the answering machine stating that the service was down, and they were working on it.
I wonder how many angry customers that message calmed down… cuz it worked for me. At least I knew I wasn’t the only one with problems.
Ah, thanks for that, smartass. I don’t think I used my Cell until after 4:30 yesterday. Good to hear they resolved it relatively quickly.
As another person said it was not a citywest problem, but a regional problem that effected most of the north, on I would guess the BELL network…which our lines go out on.
but I’m glad it was sorted out, fast. I too em on both networks rogers and citywest.
Lots of people at Seafest having problems with Citywest phones today. Might be a capacity thing. Meanwhile, I am posting this on a Rogers phone while standing in line for a bison burger.
I called the after hours line as suggested by the answering service at citywest, she was no help at all. “Tsk, okay we already know it’s not working do you want a trouble ticket or should you be just happy that we are fixing it?” She said that it really isn’t a citywest problem. Which is pretty weird because I am a citywest user and my cell is not working, so it is a citywest problem.
Then she said there are too many people trying to use the cell service, I told her that citywest should have anticipated such a problem; perhaps users need to migrate to Rogers?
My cell contract with CityWest expires this month. This is something to think about. How can CityWest be over capacity today?
I have had virtually no problems with my Rogers cell service, voice or text, since signing on last summer other than occasionally getting garbled messages from Citywest users.
I think it is time to set aside sentimental attachments to Citywest as a company that provided landline phone service for decades when there wasn’t a province-wide phone company and recognize that technological change has made small, locally-owned phone companies and internet providers obsolete. The City brain trust should look at selling off Citywest for whatever it is worth, recognizing that it is a declining asset (it’s book value was recently written down by $20 million), and putting the cash into much needed improvements to roads, water supply and other infrastructure.
HOLY MOLY! YOU GET IT. MOVE TO THE FRONT OF THE LINE.
Clearly the deal with Bell was a mistake. They signed on for Bell’s antiquated CDMA stuff, and now have no control of their own network. At least that’s the only logical conclusion, since they keep blaming Bell for all of Citywest’s problems.
It would have been easier for Citywest to just put up their own off-the-shelf GSM equipment. That’s what other small telcos in Canada have done. That’s what even the smallest player in the poorest countries on Earth have done. Isn’t it awesome that in the poorest parts of the developing world, they have better cell service than Citywest provides?
Did Dryden Mobility make a deal with Bell for outdated CDMA? Nope, they have a leadership that looks to the future, not the past. They put up their own GSM towers. How about FirstNetworks in Manitoba? They put up a cheap GSM network too. Ice Wireless in the Northwest Territories? GSM as well.
We can lay a fiber cable to Terrace but we can’t figure out how to put up GSM equipment? Bullshit.
I don’t blame Citywest employees. Clearly they didn’t decide to make the deal with Bell. They didn’t choose Beta over VHS. I think you have to look at the Citywest leadership and blame them. You have people who aren’t technically aware of what’s happening in the world – they are stuck in their 1995 world. Didn’t the head of Citywest say that he didn’t think people in Prince Rupert actually wanted mobile data or text services?
So now Citywest mobility is obviously losing to Rogers. Honestly, that’s a sad state of affairs. Rogers has some of the worst customer service on Earth. They don’t even have an office in Rupert. Yet, they are providing products and services that Citytel can’t match. Walk into Citywest and ask for the latest Nokia phone. Or ask for a Blackberry Storm. Or an iPhone. Sorry, can’t have those, because our system is stuck in 1995. Oh, Citywest phones aren’t working today? Sorry, it’s beyond our control.
Sadly, it seems that the same thing that’s happening to the mobile division is slowly happening to the internet division. We’re stuck around 1999 for internet service. We have the exact same level of service we had ten years ago, though some report that effective bandwidth is even worse now than it was before the turn of the century.
Time to either sell Citywest, or hire someone who understands that Citywest is a technology company. Technology moves at a fast pace. Once upon a time, we could be proud of Citytel – it was ahead of the curve! Imagine residential DSL in a town of 14,000 in 1998. I don’t think it existed anywhere else in Canada. Well, we’re still there in 1998. The world has moved on, and Citywest has stayed behind.
This is a death sentence for a technology company, and those who make the big decisions should be held accountable. When Citywest is bankrupt, all those jobs are lost, and the city loses a significant asset, we can all look at the Citywest leadership who didn’t think that they needed to keep up with technology because they “didn’t see a need for it.”
Perhaps at the next Citywest board meeting, someone could ask whoever made the decision to not put up our own GSM network if they would resign. Because that decision will lead to the slow death of Citywest.
There are a lot of tracking systems for shipping containers that use GSM networks to “call home.” I think there are similar systems for truckers as well. I think this is probably one of the big reasons Rogers came to town. Notice they have a tower right at the container port. I don’t see how Citywest missed that opportunity.
We had a thread two summers ago about this:
hackingthemainframe.com/smf/inde … 711.0.html
I found these quotes in that old thread, thanks to ThePodunkian:
Maher Terminal manager: "Two weeks into this adjustment, Mark’s Blackberry sits idle on his desk collecting dust "
Rob Brown from Citywest: “I’ve done some checking around with businesses in town and they don’t see a demand for [mobile data services],â€