Upgrades and Maintenance 03-03-2011

Cell_C

Cell_C

Cell C Representative
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Between the hours of midnight and 6am, 3 March 2011, we will be doing important upgrades and maintenance on 5 high traffic radio network controllers in the Durban, Cape Town and Johannesburg areas.

Interruptions can be expected from around 1am.

There will also be software upgrades of certain 3G base stations to fix certain noted customer issues on the black Huawei Cell C modems. Only slight interruptions can be expected from this activity.

Update from the CTO of Cell C
 
Last edited by a moderator:
Cell_C said:
Between the hours of midnight and 6am, 3 March 2011, we will be doing important upgrades and maintenance on 5 high traffic radio network controllers in the Durban, Cape Town and Johannesburg areas.
Click to expand...
Any chance you could give us the RNC IDs please?
That way those affected can give feed back here.
Cell_C said:
There will also be software upgrades of certain 3G base stations to fix certain noted customer issues on the black Huawei Cell C modems.
Click to expand...
Which customer issues does this fix?
 
Cell_C said:
Between the hours of midnight and 6am, 3 March 2011, we will be doing important upgrades and maintenance on 5 high traffic radio network controllers in the Durban, Cape Town and Johannesburg areas.

Interruptions can be expected from around 1am.

There will also be software upgrades of certain 3G base stations to fix certain noted customer issues on the black Huawei Cell C modems. Only slight interruptions can be expected from this activity.
Click to expand...

If there is a problem with the modems why is it only some areas being upgraded


1182260091.png
 
All, from the CTO of Cell C

It has been a couple of weeks since I have given an update, but I did wanted to provide a comprehensive update on what has been happening behind the scenes here at Cell C, post our upgrade. The implementation process has been a monumental undertaking, but we knew going into it that the benefits far out-weighed the risks. There have been some minor issues but these are being addressed and we are close to running at full speed with a much improved customer support solution.

As to the network, several things have been creating some issues in the Gauteng region, we had addressed a major issue a few weeks back with some links but this was not the base of the problem. We have continued the investigations with our vendor and we have identified a bug in the Base Station software when interacting with Release 7 devices (the new high speed devices) such as our 5GB Black Dongle, and some of the newest generation Handsets. This bug caused the Base Station to interpret certain types of messages used to setup the connection incorrectly putting the Base Station into a slumber state with very low throughput or connection problems. As more users attempted connections after this first event the Base Station's performance would decline rapidly until it was totally locked. A patch was developed for this by our vendor and installed in the GP region last night, this should solve a majority of the issues recorded but we are continuing our quest to ensure network coverage nationwide is back to super wooosh speeds.

I apologize for the time it took to identify the issue, it was very complex and required some in-depth work between the Cell C team and our vendor to identify and then develop the software correction.

Thank you for your continued support and for your feedback that you have been sending through! Keep it coming.

Regards
Ron
CTO Cell C
 
Thanks. There seems to be some improvement since this morning in the Midrand area. Hopefully this fix is permanent.

Sent from my GT-I9000 using MyBroadband Android App
 
Ron, thanks for your input here - there have been scores of your customers in the JHB area that have been left unconvinced of Cell C's abilities to provide a fast and reliable data connection.

I, personally, have been absolutely over the moon with Cell C in my area. It has been incredibly stable, and fast.

I was so happy with Cell C, that I talked several friends living in the Dunkeld West/ Sandton area to buy packages. The result is that I have been left rather embarrassed - they are self employed people running businesses from home, and with the problems you have experienced in the area, their businesses came to a standstill. They were forced out of desperation to return their Modems and SIM cards, and buy into Vodacom contracts !!!!!
It's regretable, because people such as these will probably never give Cell C a second chance. I think Cell C has caused a lot of damage and lost credibility among a large group of it's customer base. Perhaps it was implemented incorrectly, perhaps Cell C should rather have rolled out in JHB/PTA on a suburb by suburb basis, rather than trying to do the whole of Gauteng in one foul swoop.

Well, what is done is done. Let's hope you get to the bottom of it, and sort out existing problem areas before rolling out new areas.

For me, I have been one of the lucky ones, living in an area with sparse activity on 900 Mhz (Richards Bay). I have only had two days with data problems, in the space of three months
 
Hi,

The feedback is appreciated, though unfortunately I am still experiencing some of the same issue (low to no throughput) in the Gauteng region (Sandton area, Sandhurst and Morningside). It is a little better in that it works for small periods but then the problems reccur.

My other dissapointment is that whilst obviously Cell C was aware of the issue and it was being investigated any support techs would deny that there are any issues on the network and rather blame the user's PC etc.
 
i love my cell c

'So we are going to get another 5Gig data free again for inconvenience caused, let me start downloading my favourites movies before my data got reset by morning :D
 
Performance has been okay in my area, but today it's suddenly declined.

You guys moving the base stations around?
 
mazelove said:
'So we are going to get another 5Gig data free again for inconvenience caused, let me start downloading my favourites movies before my data got reset by morning :D
Click to expand...

lol, it would be nice, but i would not put any money on it
 
Got a call from a technician tonight, as I requested, but my connection was back to being stable albeit not as fast as last week. Glad things are on their way to working again. Thanks for the feedback, Mr. CTO!
 
Cell C uses Nokia Siemens in Gauteng and ZTE in the rest of the country as far as I know. So a software glitch found in Gauteng will only affect Gauteng.
 
What about the people that weren't able to use there data allocation because of this problem? Thankfully I had used up most of my data before I ran into problems, but I read about lotsa people here in the forum who weren't able to use their data for over a month... I'm guessing somewhere in the terms and conditions there's something about us taking the package at our own risk, etc etc, & I know problems like these are to be expected in a new network, but a little show of good faith could go a long way towards improving Cell C's brand image... just a thought...
 
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