'Fobbed off' villagers without phone signal for four months - still no date for reconnection
Frustrated village residents have had enough of being "fobbed off" and left with no mobile phone signal for nearly four months.
A mast covering Bomere Heath, near Shrewsbury, was knocked out of action by flooding in December and engineers have been unable to get "safe access".
Villager Pat Hughes said: "I feel very frustrated by it. It feels like they are fobbing us off - it's not having any concrete information that makes you annoyed."
Mrs Hughes, whose husband David uses mobile phones for his pedigree sheep breeding business, said: "You can't get to anybody with information and it is really annoying."
Alexandra Titley, said she has not been able to receive phone calls from hospital consultants over the treatment of her very unwell daughter.
"It's just very inconvenient," she said. "Everybody needs to make and receive phone calls. I can use Whatsapp to make calls but not everyone else knows how to do that."
She added too that a "huge part of the frustration" is that villagers only found out that the phone mast had flooded through local knowledge and not from mobile phone providers.
Villagers say they are having to rely on occasional messages that have been saying the same thing every time, that there is a problem and engineers are trying to fix it.
The mast in Preston Gubbals Lane is the joint responsibility of Vodafone, and O2.
A spokesperson for Vodafone said water levels have dropped but the ground remains "unsafe" to carry out electrical safety tests.
A statement from the company did not give an estimate of the time it would take to fix the issue, adding they would carry out the work as "soon as possible."
The spokesperson said: “We sorry to our customers who are experiencing issues with their services.
"Our Network team has been unable to access the site since the outage was reported due to safety concerns and severe weather conditions.
"They have been visiting the site frequently to assess when it can be safely accessed for the repair to be completed.
"While the team has determined that water levels have now dropped to a safe level, the ground conditions remain unsafe for our teams to carry out electrical safety tests.
"We will continue to assess the conditions as we work hard to restore services as soon as possible. We encourage our customers to sign up for Network Checker to receive status updates regarding network issues."
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