'Our village's Wifi stops working when it rains'

Residents said connectivity has worsened over the last few months

People living in a North Yorkshire village have claimed they are struggling to live, work and run their businesses due to the weather affecting Wifi connectivity.

Residents of Westow, between York and Malton, also said there has never been dependable phone signal in the village so they have to rely on the Wifi to make calls.

James Carter, who works from home, said: "Whenever it rains we get drops in service, the Wifi just disappears and completely cuts out and anything we were using will just cut off."

Openreach, which provides broadband to the area, apologised for 'connectivity issues' and said engineers were "working hard to identify the cause".

John Mateer, who has lived in the village for 23 years, first had correspondence with BT back in 2017 about the issue.

"There's a microwave link that transmits the data back and forth," he said.

"The problem with a microwave link is that it's susceptible to anything that can interrupt the beam between the sender and the receiver.

"When it rains, for example, if there's heavy rain, that will break the internet. It will be out for a period and then come back."

Julie Mason said she was worried connectivity was impacting her pub's revenue

Businesses in the village also said issues with connectivity were impacting their trade.

"The card machine needs the internet, our booking system needs the internet, our telephone is a cloud phone, everything needs the internet," said Julie Mason, who runs The Blacksmiths Arms.

"People come to pay, the card machine won't work because there's no internet, so we have to ask them to honestly give us their telephone number so that we can give them a ring to do payment over the phone when the internet is back on.

"We've had one or two which we've not been able to contact so we lose money that way."

Sarah Robinson regularly needs to take confidential work calls

Westow residents have started a petition calling on Openreach to conduct a thorough investigation into the cause of the outages.

Home worker Sarah Robinson, who often takes confidential calls, said: "You can't predict when it is, it could just fail on a day where I have six or seven hours of calls and it's really quite troublesome because I don't have the time to get somewhere else and log on.

"We've been known to jump in our car and go and sit in a supermarket car park to get signal."

Mr Carter, whose remote role is with the emergency services, added: "It got to the point where I could see it was starting to rain and I would tell everybody on the Teams call that I would come back on when the shower had passed. It became a bit of a running joke."

The local MP, Kevin Hollinrake, said he had raised the problems with Openreach and would continue to press for a "swift resolution".

An Openreach spokesperson said: "We're aware that residents in Westow, North Yorkshire, are experiencing connectivity issues and we're sorry for the disruption. Our engineers are working hard to identify the cause and restore service as quickly as possible. We appreciate everyone's patience while we work to resolve this."

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