Vodacom’s Fix-it plan
Vodacom has instituted a fix-it plan to make network outages, dropped calls and disconnected services a thing of the past.
Portia Maurice, Vodacom’s chief officer of corporate affairs told Moneyweb that since the most calamitous of Vodacom’s network outages on June 30—the last day for cellphone users to register their Sim cards under the new RICA Act it has “put a lot of time and effort into understanding the events of June 30″.
“We’ve subsequently installed additional links to provide an additional backup layer and also installed software upgrades to improve resilience. We’ve also had an international team of transmission experts do an audit of our network,” said Maurice.
However, last weekend – July 23 was another network dead day for some Vodacom subscribers. Maurice said a number of unrelated incidents took place that day.
“RIM [the owners of BlackBerry] had some problems with the BlackBerry Messenger service, some base stations in Sandton were down for maintenance and a number of customers who had recently completed a SIM swap were temporarily unable to connect to the network,” added Maurice.
Asked if increased data usage could also explain the June 30 and other disruptions, Maurice says the company anticipated the boom in data growth and catered for it with its investment plans over a number of years.
“This was one of the reasons we installed an extensive backbone of fibre optic transmission capacity and are upgrading the complete network to the latest available technology,” she added.
Asked if Vodacom’s R6bn investment in upgrading its networks could be affecting the quality of its service, Maurice stated that the two are not related, “We work hard to ensure that network upgrades don’t result in temporary localised outages.” Maurice added that the investment “includes all areas of the network such as the roll out of voice and data capacity, new coverage, and building more resilience into the network.”
Portia Maurice
What does this mean for consumers?
Maurice said “With the actions taken since June 30, we are confident that we won’t have similar interruptions. We work hard to ensure that network upgrades don’t result in temporary localised outages,” she added. Whilst technical problems are inevitable in any industry, Vodacom says it has plans to “build redundancy into the complex network system.”
Whilst all this might seem promising, should there be interruptions subscribers can port to another provider or complain to the National Consumer Commission.
Let’s hope that the network that once gained popularity due to its catchy “Yebo Gogo” pay off line will once again restore confidence in its subscribers.
Source: Moneyweb
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