"Terrible" people get mobile phones

VILLAGERS, once dubbed 'the terribles' by a 17th century bishop, have been given mobile phones.

Eighty people in the village of Rassa were labelled the terribles because they survived  such extreme conditions in the Italian side of the alps.

Now, after two years of battles, the village has won the right to get a mobile phone tower.

The Italian press has reported that the tiny village is used to winning battles. For centuries they have been cut off by snow and survival had been a real problem. However, getting the village into the 21st century was tricky because none of the phone suppliers wanted to extend their networks up the alps.

Fabrizio Tocci, the mayor, said that when normal phones do not work, the village has a problem in trying to help tourists, or people who look for mushrooms, who all seem to have a knack for getting lost.

Mobile phone technology also had a few problems. A tower has been built to house a Vodafone repeater which can cover the valley with a signal.

However after the technicians left, the snow arrived and shut the service down.

It turned out that Vodafone had hoped that its repeater tower would be OK if it was connected to an ordinary phone line. But the phone lines are dropped every winter.
The next idea, which actually worked, was to build a second repeater using Telecom Italia. This covered the hole where the landline was unusable.

All in, it cost the region €30,000 and Vodafone an undisclosed sum.

It still is not finished. Currently the town is under four metres of snow and no one wants to pop out to finish the work. However they hope that in spring everything will be ready and life will not be so terrible. µ