This post has been split off from a previous thread discussing a long-term outage in Market Harborough, because it was expressing concern over an apparent series of short-term outages in the Strathcarron area of the north-west Highlands.
To give some context, EE are co-located on every site in this area on which VF have installs, but also have several additional sites of their own from which no other operator has service. This is not an unusual scenario in some areas of the Highlands, and does give EE a broadly improved coverage footprint.
On the shared sites, a notable example being roughly a third of the way along the A890 from Strathcarron to Stromeferry, each network will have their own independent power supply, equipment & antennas, but will occupy different locations on the same tower. This also allows for different capacity deployments, again here EE have additional spectrum compared with VF.
The recent outage coincided with inclement weather, it's not at all unusual for networks to lose coverage in these scenarios - often due to either a loss of incoming power or backhaul connection to the core network. Sometimes an operator may have reliability issues with part of their install, but once faulty kit is identified, it will be replaced as soon as is practicable if it's causing service issues.
