The Catalan Pyrenees suffered severe drops in telephone coverage during Christmas 2024, and the Generalitat decided to take a step forward so that no small municipality would ever again feel neglected due to a network failure. The Government launched the Telcocat service nine months ago, in October, a channel to report telecommunications outages that integrates institutions and operators. The channel, which 750 municipalities have joined, has managed 450 incidents so far and received more than 1,000 calls.
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The service is basically intended to serve the small municipalities of rural Catalonia. The Government has set out to end coverage problems, and the protocol requires telephone companies to be accountable both to the Generalitat and to the municipalities affected by supply cuts. The protocol also requires — thanks to public-private collaboration — the deployment of the fiber optic and mobile phone network to try to ensure that 100% of the population has full connectivity.
Albert Tort, telecommunications secretary of the Government, gives a positive assessment of the service and explains that it represents a “paradigm shift” by placing the local world, the Generalitat, and the operators in the same communication ecosystem. Of the 450 incidents, 88 are recurrent. “And that shows us the points where we can intervene to make the network more robust,” he says. This is the first time that municipalities have a direct telephone channel with operators to report and track outages.
With 64%, mobile coverage failures top the list of incidents with 294 cases; in second place, with 17%, are cases related to broadband (81); in third position, with 13%, are combined mobile and broadband issues (62 incidents); and lastly, with 4% of cases and 22 incidents, is DTT coverage. “More than 60% of the incidents are related to mobile coverage, with data on the phone or card readers,” Tort specifies, highlighting that Telecot is a channel for information to flow among all parties and speed up its resolution, where progress on the incident is reported.
“It is a very good initiative. It gives us tools to either knock on a cold door and be able to put faces and names. It is easier when we need someone to fix an infrastructure failure. It is not the same for a user to call you as for a mayor,” says the republican Xavier Castellana, third vice president of the Solsonès County Council and head of Telecommunications. Some municipalities in the county, he says, have used the service.
The Riner councilor also argues that the small municipalities in the county live with coverage lack or failure problems that are aggravated by an area where the population is scattered and the density is very low. “People sometimes associate municipality with town, and that is not always the case. There are municipalities that are only parishes with scattered houses,” he says to explain the complexity of communications that has led them to pool services from the County Council. “When the fiber or card readers go down in Sant Llorenç de Morunys, in the Vall de Lord, which is a tourist area, what do the shops do? We need direct communication with the operator,” he explains.
The TelcoCat service is part of the Government’s goal to strengthen Catalonia’s telecommunications network to make it more reliable and secure. The Executive is deploying the publicly owned fiber optic network, which already exceeds 8,000 kilometers and aims to reach all municipalities this same legislature, which expires in 2028. At the same time, the Government is promoting the XCatConnecta project, which will progressively link its 6,100 headquarters and facilities to the public fiber optic network.
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