Your cellular service has been improved. No, really.

Towers are upgraded, new ones added, says Eastern Ontario Regional Network

This tower is at County Road 50 and the 11th line West.

If you want to get a conversation started, just casually ask most people in Trent Hills what they think of their cell service.

But be forewarned, stand well back and be ready to duck.

Like many people, my wife and I don’t have a landline, we each have our own phones. We’re with Koodo, the slightly cheaper version of Telus. A flanker brand is the industry jargon. Like many people, we suffer from calls that are dropped, garbled, or go direct to voicemail because the signal is too weak.

These things happen while in our house in Campbellford, or pretty-much anywhere when we’re out and about in the area.

In a recent Facebook discussion, about 20 people shared similar experiences. The consensus seemed to be that the ‘best’ of the providers was Rogers, but the bar was low. The strongest praise it received was “it’s fairly adequate.”

A couple of weeks back a reader asked me why his service remains lousy since I had written a story two years ago about a plan to upgrade towers in Trent Hills and across Northumberland County and indeed all of Eastern Ontario.

I had been wondering too, so I went looking for an update on the upgrades and learned the work is almost complete.

“In Northumberland County, 20 existing cell towers have been upgraded with 5G equipment,” said Lisa Severson, spokesperson for the Eastern Ontario Regional Network, (EORN), which was established by the Eastern Ontario Wardens’ Caucus. “These upgrades are complete and the sites are currently providing service.”

In addition, 16 new towers have been built and are in service and another one is just being completed in Cramhe Township and should be online shortly.

In total, $16 million was spent in Northumberland on 20 improvements in service, 10 new Rogers’ towers, and six new towers shared with other providers.

In Trent Hills, two towers near Campbellford have been upgraded to 5G service, and four new towers were built.

One tower near Hastings has also been upgraded. Three co-location towers are now in service south of Hastings and in the Warkworth area. A new tower was also built on the Alderville First Nation.

But, but, my calls are still breaking up despite all this work. Well, Severson had a partial explanation.

“Please note that Rogers’ customers, as well as customers of its flanker brands Fido and Chatr, should experience improved wireless coverage and capacity as a result of this new infrastructure,” she said in an email.

“EORN does encourage the sharing of tower infrastructure between carriers,” Severson said. “Seventy-five of the towers in our project are colocations where Rogers is leasing space from another carrier or a third-party company that owns a tower. It is a business decision by carriers as to whether they choose to collocate.”

The federal government encourages cell service providers to share their towers with competitors, but the results are not great. I imagine Rogers and Bell sticking a Telus/Koodo antenna near the bottom of a tower pointed at the ground.

In total, Rogers spent $150 million on the upgrades and the federal and provincial governments each contributed $71 million. Counties in Eastern Ontario added $10 million.

In May, I wrote about Bell Mobility’s application to build a new tower in Campbellford for its customers. It hopes to construct the 60-metre tower at the northern end of the municipal works yard on Alma Street, adjacent to the Trans-Canada Trail.

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You can read all Trent Hills News stories on my website here.