There have been some cases about UTL customers not being able to send on-net SMSs to fellow UTL customers. While UTL has had a rough time recently owing to its never ending woes, they’ve been more of external but this recent revelation had questions rising up as to what exactly is happening to Uganda’s oldest Telco given UTL customers themselves couldn’t exchange SMSs.
Well, there have been issues and they’ve been answers as to why those issues have been happening and considerable step being taken to resolve this current issue. According to UTL’s PRO, the recent woes can be attributed to different factors but what stands out is vandalism of infrastructure.
Here is what he had to say; “Failure to send texts can be caused by different things such as vandalism of infrastructure like masts, cables, poles, or even natural factors like weather etc.., that could affect only a particular area of operation. We have engaged the Police to bring vandals to book, and employed security guards to secure all our equipment to handle the avoidable causes.
There is no such time when all UTL customers across the country were not able to send messages. The times when some customers couldn’t send messages were isolated cases that could have been caused by any of the various reasons stated above. Plus our technical team is always on standby to rectify such mishaps in the shortest time possible.
At the moment all such problems have been resolved, and all customers can now send text messages across all networks.”
The response clarifies cases as being isolated not a general problem. This means only a fraction of UTL customers were affected. At first it was reported as being a general problem where UTL’s over 700,000 customers were not able to use its short messaging service (SMS) but this further clarifies the causes and efforts rendered to rectify them.
