Verizon Wireless has not had the best month in December in terms of its network service. The wireless phone carrier has experienced three extended and nationwide periods of downtime in December, including one that happened just this week. On Thursday, Verizon finally issued an official statement on the outages that offered an explanation for what has been causing all of these issues.
In a interview with GigaOM, Verizon"s VP of network engineering Mike Haberman said that each of the three outages, all of which affected the 4G LTE portion of the network, had different causes:
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 said.
In its own statement on Verizon"s web site, the company said, "Our engineers have successfully diagnosed those past triggering events, and they have not re-occurred. We also work diligently to rectify technical problems in the Network before they affect any customers."
The company added that it is taking additional steps to make sure that these problems do not reoccur:
Among the numerous measures we have taken or will take are: geographic segmentation, which enables us to isolate, contain and rectify network performance issues, and maintain service to the majority of customers when an issue does develop; and software fixes that we have developed, tested and applied regularly – and will continue to do so. Both will improve performance and reliability.