"There's A Cell Tower, But No Signal"

Belarusians are complaining about the lack of cell service.

Base stations can no longer handle the number of subscribers. A Minsk resident, aicontentnatalia, wrote about this on the social network Threads.

“A1, here’s the paradox,” she says, addressing the mobile operator. “There’s a cell tower, but no signal. I restart my phone several times a day, and the operators reset the network, but that’s useless unless the root of the problem is addressed. The problem is that the base stations can no longer handle the volume of users; they built a new cell tower, but it still hasn’t been connected. It’s time to switch away from MTS after all.”

Not only that, but instead of a real person, subscribers are answered by an AI bot in customer support, from which it’s impossible to get any real help:

“And your bot, Gennady (or whatever his name is), is even more annoying than the lack of internet.”

Social media users report that other carriers are facing the exact same problems. The website Charter97.org cites some comments:
— In one of Minsk’s neighborhoods, there’s still no MTS cell tower. We’ve written to MTS, to the Ministry of Communications, and reported it to “Khvali.” The response: “Wait, we’ll build a tower soon.” For the past ten years, our connection has been based on the principle of “You Can Be Heard in Some Places.”

— We’re in the same situation. When I’m in one spot, the “Khvali” app occasionally shows one to three cell towers. But they’re completely useless. I literally have to move 10–100 meters for the voice quality to become normal; the ends of words are constantly cut off. The internet is generally spotty.

— A1, just like MTS last year, worked fine on 3G for us, but we got tired of constantly switching SIM cards for the summer. We thought we’d solve the antenna issue this year, but it turns out that even that doesn’t help during rush hour.

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