“Although severe network disruptions impacted all Portuguese carriers during the blackout,” mobile customers “on the Digi network were significantly more likely to experience a total service loss,” states a study available here.
The document titled ‘Vulnerability to Resilience: How Portuguese Mobile Networks Responded to the Iberian Peninsula Blackout’ notes that “up to 90% of Digi subscribers were without mobile coverage for more than 24 hours, exposing critical gaps in multiple layers of infrastructure redundancy, from edge mobile sites to the core, potentially reflecting the limitations of a less mature network build” of this operator in Portugal.
In contrast, Meo’s network (Altice Portugal) “demonstrated significantly greater resilience throughout the Portuguese territory during the April 28 blackout, highlighting how robust and widely deployed battery reserves can significantly mitigate and delay the impacts of power failures.”
According to Ookla, “at the peak of the service disruption, between six and eight hours after the power loss, Meo subscribers were, on average, half as likely to lose service compared to NOS, four times less likely than Vodafone, and six times less likely than Digi users.”
As a result, “likely tens of thousands of Meo subscribers remained connected for calls, messages, and data throughout April 28.”
At the height of the network disruptions that night, more than one in three mobile network users in Portugal lost service.
The variation in the impact of disruptions among operators in Portugal “was significantly greater than in Spain, revealing much deeper asymmetry in the level of power resilience in Portuguese mobile networks,” the report states.
