NTC ask telcos to turn off network services during Papal visit

There wre a lot of concessions being made during the 5-day visit of the Pope. There’s cancellation of domestic and int’l flights, road re-routing, class/work suspension, no drone flying zones and the suspension of telecom services by telcos.

Yesterday, just moment before the arrival of the Pope in the Philippines, network service by all telcos were suspended or turned off.

This resulted into partial or full shutdown of services — limited to no SMS, voice or data services.

In our own quick survey among readers, the network services heavily affected are areas in Makati, Pasay and Manila. However, there are reports of loss in signal even as far down as Paranaque and Cavite (our team in Cavite reported PLDT Ultera services went down to a crawl and CSR confirmed) as far up as Caloocan and Bulacan.

Accroding to SMS notifications sent by the netwoorks at around 9PM, the intermittent network services were due to the huge volume of people flocking the affected areas (specifically Makati, Pasay and Manila).

Likewise, suceeding SMS messages also confirmed that telcos had to abide by the mandate of NTC to suspend or limit services due to security reasons caused by the Pope’s visit.

Here are copies of those SMS messages:

Smart has warned that similar outages will continue to happen in the next few days (perhaps until the 19th).

This is perhaps the first time in recent hsitory that the Government, via the NTC, has mandated suspension of telecom services metro-wide in numerous cities and for several days due to security reasons. Similar situations before were only isolated to specific areas.

The Pope, as head of Roman Catholic Church and head of state of Vatican, is a huge security concern that required such compliance.

Updated: According to telco sources, the mandate was for areas where the Pope is traveling and per cell tower. Cities like Las Pinas or Bacoor may also be affected due to the radius of the cell towers (in the case of MOA where the it’s down during the time). Cell signal is then automatically restored once the Pope leaves a specific area.

This means network engineers have to be on rotation 24/7 to monitor the location of the Pope and to turn the cell towers in nearby areas.

Here’s a copy of their official statement:

Globe Advisory: Globe customers who are participating in today’s Papal events may experience temporary loss of mobile services. This is being done for security reasons in compliance with the government’s directive. However, DSL services in the affected areas and our mobile services are up in cities outside the Papal events. Rest assured that mobile signal will be restored as soon as we get a go signal from the NTC. We apologize for the inconvenience. We hope for your understanding. We’re working closely with the government for the safe visit of Pope Francis in the Philippines. Thank you.