Vodacom network outage angers customers

Thousands of Vodacom customers were left angry yesterday as a network blackout prevented many from making and receiving calls and SMS messages.

Vodacom said the outage, which affected subscribers in selected spots across the country, was a “multiple failure of transmission system equipment which provides the connectivity to support the wireless network.”

Cellphone subscribers were reporting network problems from about 11am till 5pm yesterday, with some demanding compensation.

Vodacom posted a statement on its Facebook page, which included a statement from Chief Technical Officer Andries Delport.

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“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,” he said.

“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.”

Discussing the overall plans for the network, Delport said: "We are spending more than R6-billion on our network in South Africa this year to improve our service to all customers. We will be increasing the number of 3G base stations and adding significantly to our own transmission network capacity."