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First BB Now Optus Goes Down |
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Written by Adam Gosling
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Wednesday, 25 April 2007 |
A bad week for mobile reliability
as first The BlackBerry service hits the deck and then the Melbourne
sector of the Optus mobile phone network went AWOL for a full 10 hours.
Fortunately
for business users the black-out came in the middle of the night with
an equipment failure causing a network outage that left 2G and 3G
mobile customers in Melbourne without service on Saturday night,
according to reports.
The
timing was not so great for social users however, with the outage
beginning at 11pm on Saturday night and lasting until 9am Sunday
morning.
Optus said the network downtime, caused by "a
vendor-related hardware fault" not only put voice communications off
the air, but SMS as well, leaving late night revellers without a booty
call.
The outage was restricted to a 15km radius covering the Melbourne CBD.
Meanwhile, the CrackBerry brigade were similarly disaffected when the BlackBerry service failed in the US late last week. With CrackBerry
addicts seriously unhappy about the failure, Research In Motion (RIM) has had
to announce an internal review of what went wrong. The US BlackBerry
service was out for about 12 hours between on the 17 - 18 April .
It only affected US account holders, including those who were roaming in
other regions at the time.
"It's very rare that we have these events," said RIM's Jim Balsillie
promising to make internal changes to ensure the stuff-up won't happen
again. The last time Mobilised reported on a BlackBerry blackout was in
July 2005,
nearly two years ago, so Balsillie is probably justified is saying its
a rare occasion, but Vodafone's BlackBerry users in New South Wales
were without their email just over a month ago.
In that instance, however, the problem was totally unrelated to BlackBerry or Research in Motion. A new hardware switch
at Vodafone's Newington exchange suffered organ rejection and halted
GPRS data traffic for five hours while engineers worked frantically to undo what they had done.
Admitting
last week's US outage was something RIM accidentally caused to itself,
the failure came when a new cache storage device was deployed without
being properly tested. Engineers quickly implemented the disaster
recovery procedure of move to a back-up server which also failed
causing a further delay in restoring the service.
"There are
times when a mistake can happen and you think your processes are
designed to handle every eventuality, and every now and then, one
doesn't,"Balsillie said. "Of course you take action to ensure it doesn't happen again."
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