RESIDENTS in Kington have been left without mobile network coverage for three weeks.

People who have Vodafone contracts for their mobile phones have been left frustrated by the lack of signal and have not been able to make calls, send texts or use the internet.

Resident Cath Duggan said: "I just absolutely despair at the moment. It has been three weeks now. The signal from Vodafone has been dodgy for a while now- for a good couple of months.

"It has been down for three weeks. We have all been given different answers from Vodafone with varying lengths of time as to when it will be fixed."

Some have been told it will be six weeks before the problem is solved.

She said one mother has had to ground her daughter as she does not want her to go out in the town, without the ability to get in touch with her.

Others have been left isolated as they do not have a land line number.

Mrs Duggan said they have also felt frustrated that they will be charged if they want to end their contracts, despite not being able to use their mobile phones.

Jane Frapwell, corporate communications manager for Vodafone, said: "We’re sorry some of our customers in Kington have been experiencing signal problems recently.

"We are aware of the problems and our engineers are currently investigating to get to the root cause of the problem. We’ll get the site up and running as soon as we can."

Update at 4.30pm on Tuesday, August 25: Vodafone spokesman Jane Frapwell said: "Our engineers have isolated the issue and they have concluded that there is a fault on the transmission link caused by tree growth which is disrupting the signal. 

"We are now planning to raise the height of the transmission dish to overcome this."