French connection fails to tackle Green Army blackout

THE Republic of Ireland’s performance in Paris may have brought the house down but the fans went one better - they brought down the city’s phone system.

Thousands of travelling supporters were left without mobile phone coverage from early afternoon on Saturday as the Parisian networks failed to keep up with the insatiable dialling habits of the chattering Irish.

Anxious members of the Green Army who were desperately trying to locate comrades in the city, or sworn to ring home, initially blamed Vodafone for the City of Lights’ blackout.

But the phone company said the problem lay with its main roaming partner, French mobile phone operator SFR, which was ill-prepared to deal with the surge of demand.

The difficulties were compounded by a switch failure on France Telecom’s landline network, which is used to route international mobile calls between operators such as SFR to Eircom and on to Vodafone.

Vodafone spokeswoman Tara Delaney said Irish people used their mobile phones at least twice as much as their French counterparts and the sudden arrival of 35,000 extra consumers concentrated in key areas of Paris caused havoc with SFR’s network.

“If there were 35,000 fans, you can be sure there were 35,000 mobile phones, and between phoning home, phoning hotels and phoning and texting each other, there would have been a huge number of calls made in a short space of time,” she said.

“The problem is that the network is made up of cells and each cell has a finite capacity so if a cell can handle 50 calls at any one time, caller 51 is not going to get through and it will be a matter of luck when they do manage to get through.

“We’re used to that situation here. For example, on major match days at Croke Park, we bring in extra infrastructure in that area to deal with the extra demand we anticipate. It seems SFR just weren’t prepared and there was absolutely nothing we could do from a technical perspective to improve the situation.”

Vodafone said it would be raising the issue with SFR and making clear the inconvenience caused to its customers.