Rain users hit by downtime
Rain customers across South Africa are reporting problems with their Internet connections.
Downdetector shows a large spike in downtime reports for the Rain network, all of which relate to Internet connectivity problems.
It is unclear if both 5G fixed-wireless customers and 4G mobile users are affected, and complaints on social media and the Downdetector website originate from both customer bases.
Downdetector shows that reports of downtime saw a sharp increase as of 08:00 on Friday 17 April and have continued up to the time of writing.
According to the outage map, users in Johannesburg, Cape Town, and Durban are the most affected by this outage.
The image below shows the spike in Downdetector reports for Rain since 08:00 on Friday 17 April.
New temporary spectrum
Rain is one of South Africa’s mobile networks which today received additional temporary spectrum to help improve its network quality during the national coronavirus lockdown.
This spectrum will be released for the duration of the national state of disaster and is expected to ease network congestion.
It should also enable operators to maintain the quality of broadband services and lower the cost of access to consumers.
Rain was allocated 30MHz of spectrum in the 2,600MHz band by the Independent Communications Authority of South Africa (ICASA).
Other recipients of temporary spectrum allocations included Vodacom, MTN, Telkom, and Liquid Telecom.
It is unclear whether the allocation of this new spectrum is related to the downtime experienced this morning.
Update – Rain billing issues
Rain CEO Willem Roos told MyBroadband that while they were not aware of any outage, the spike in Internet outage reports on Downdetector may be due to a billing issue on the network.
“The rain network is functioning well and we are not aware of any large outage,” Roos said.
“During the lockdown period, Rain has afforded customers an additional two weeks to settle their accounts. As such, this billing issue may be behind what Downdetector is observing.”
“Customers should thus go to rain.co.za and have a look at their dashboard to ensure their accounts are up to date,” he said.
Now read: Here are the companies which received more spectrum
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