Numerous Vodacom subscribers reported network problems today (30 June 2011), ranging from the inability to make calls and send SMSs to downtime on the Vodacom data network.
The problems started soon after midday, and Vodacom said at the time that they are aware that “certain customers are experiencing issues calling and SMSing”.
The cause of the problems was not known when the downtime occurred, but initial indications were that the downtime is related to transmission failure which in turn caused hardware errors at various nodes on the Vodacom network.
“The cause of the outage, which affected subscribers in selected spots across the country, was a multiple failure of transmission system equipment.This transmission system provides the connectivity to support the wireless network. The transmission failure, which occurred late this morning, had a knock-on effect on other areas of the network. This resulted in an overall degradation of service,” said Vodacom spokesperson Richard Boorman.
Vodacom’s services started to come back online at just before 17:00 today, but there is still not an exact time at which all services will be back to normal.
Speaking about the outage, Chief Technical Officer Andries Delport said: “We’re currently working flat out to get service restored to all customers as quickly as possible. We expect that network congestion could persist into this evening but are confident that it will subside quickly.” “From here we will be running a full investigation into the cause of the failure and more importantly how we can further improve network redundancy. We apologise to every customer who has been affected. What happened today was not acceptable and we will make sure that we do everything possible to avoid a recurrence.”
MTN also experienced some network problems today, but these issues have been resolved already. “We experienced data related network issues earlier today that affected approximately 10,000 of our subscribers. This has since been resolved. This had no effect on RICA registrations,” said MTN spokesperson Bridget Bhengu.
Vodacom services are being restored << Comments and views
Article courtesy of MyBroadband – Vodacom services starting to come back online