Verizon has hit some “bumps” – outages – since it began rolling out its high-speed LTE wireless network in the fall, but the company says that is the relatively low price of bringing a new technology to market.
“Being a pioneer comes with growing pains. The recent issues that affected our customers’ 4GLTE service were unforeseen despite careful, diligent planning, deployment and ongoing upgrade programs,” Verizon said in a statement this week.
“Problems customers experienced affected connectivity to the 4GLTE Network and data service. Several times, we have proactively “moved” 4GLTE customers onto our 3G Network to ensure all would have a data connection. For brief periods, such as on Wednesday, 4GLTE customers could not connect to the 3G Network as quickly as we would have liked,” it continued.
“”Nonetheless, we estimate that 4GLTE connectivity has been available approximately 99 percent of the time this year< Verizon said.
In an interview with the tech website GigaOM, Mike Haberman, Verizon Wireless vice president of network engineering, said, ““Being the pioneers, we’re going to experience some growing pains. These issues we’ve been experiencing are certainly regrettable, but they were unforeseeable.”
The first outage on Dec. 7 was caused by the failure of a back-up communications database. The second, last week, was the result of an IMS element not responding properly, while Wednesday’s outage was caused by two IMS elements not communicating properly, Haberman told GigaOM.
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