O2 have come under fire from BBC Watchdog after the residents and local businesses of Hampshire’s Liphook village got in touch when the mobile phone signal for the area vanished completely.

Anyone with an O2 mobile was left without a reliable signal and at times the signal was completely down. This was disastrous for businesses and consumers alike and many had to drive outside of the village just to call someone.

The problems with an intermittent signal carried on for a month and eventually the amount of O2 complaints hit the roof. However the mobile phone giant was less than helpful. One of the residents, Jane Wright, explained that after having had a good signal previously she was very concerned when she started suffering coverage problems. When she contacted O2 she was further disappointed:

“When you can finally get through to them, half the time it’s, “we haven’t heard there’s a problem”.

Eventually O2 informed Jane the problem would be resolved and it did get better for a few days but then the old issues resurfaced. Again O2 gave Jane another date but this time advised her that they couldn’t promise it would be put right.

This is when BBC Watchdog stepped in and took a leading expert in mobile communications, John Raw, to investigate. It was identified that it was a simple problem with the signal tower – an issue that could be resolved within 24 hours.

While the Watchdog team were filming an engineer arrived to fix the problem and by the end of that day the village was back in signal.

O2 apologised for the inconvenience to its Lidhook customers and went on to say:

“We are keen to encourage customers who have been affected by the loss of service in Liphook to call our Customer Services team and we will discuss and review their bill with them.”

This highlights how important it is to check out mobile network reviews for business users before signing up for a mobile phone contract. Although the service provider may state there is coverage in an area it is always worth double checking the experience of other users before you commit.

Popularity: 24% [?]