“How’d you solve the icing problem?”
“Icing problem?”
“Might want to look into it.”
— Iron Man (2008)

On a particularly cold Saturday morning a couple of years ago, my mobile phone couldn’t get any signal for a few hours. But I didn’t really care, because I had breakfast to eat, animals to feed, and nobody I urgently needed to talk to at the time. Also it came good again shortly after midday.

The following week the same thing happened, but for rather longer, i.e. well into the evening. This was enough to prompt me to use my landline to call Optus (our mobile phone provider) and report a fault. The usual dance ensued:

“Have you tried turning it off and on again?”
“Yes.”
“Have you tried a different handset?”
“Yes.”
“A different SIM?”
“Yes.”
“Holding the phone in your other hand?”
“Yes.”
“Sacrificing a lamb to the god Mercury?”
“Yes.”

I might be misremembering the details of the conversation, but you get the idea. Long story short, I got a fault lodged.

Later I received a call – on my mobile – asking if my mobile was working again. “Indeed it is, and you wouldn’t have been able to make this call if it wasn’t”, I replied. Then I asked what the problem had been. “Let me check”, said the support person. “Uhm… It says here there was… 100mm of ice on the local tower.”

Flash forwards to a couple of days ago, when snow fell down to sea level for the first time since 2005, and my mobile phone was dead again. I can only assume they haven’t solved the icing problem, and that maybe the local NBN fixed wireless tower suffers from the same affliction, as that was dead too for something like 24 hours.

It was very pretty though.