Vodacom Network Outage: Who is to blame?

http://www.itweb.co.za/sections/telecoms/2006/0605221055.asp?O=FPLEAD

Vodacom says the disruption was caused by Cell C “transferring illegal data” across its network, causing its own network to fail for one hour. However, Cell C vehemently denied this.

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seems like vodacom trying to save face.... why blame poor Cell C? if it is Cell C then why dont cell c just do whatever they did on friday every few hours and then that way cause vodacom to be down every day? seems silly that cell c can cause vodacom to crash completely?

And how come no 'illegal' data was ever sent before?

Skip said:

And how come no 'illegal' data was ever sent before?

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exactly, if it was when Cell C just started you could understand it but now? come on seriously now.

of course my product is ok,no problem here must be your product! No it isn't...

And this is how the public mud flinging starts

VodaCom has already set precident when their network went down previously, which put into question the stability of their network design.

Interestingly enough, they were very cavalier and hasty to dish out blame, without having first established the actual cause of the problem. At this point all they can say is that severing the link with Cell C fixed the problem.

We have a tiny IP network consisting of a few IP links to other PABX's.

A screwy PABX forwarding schema is able to bring itself down when (user coaxing involved) incoming calls are forwarded to another unit which in turns redirects back to the original box thereby overloading the source unit.

In VCom/Cell C terms.

Imagine vodacom receiving incoming 082 calls, inadvertantly routing them to Cell C due to a misconfiguration and Cell C returning the route to VodaCom.

We overload the Vodacom system, now VodaCom drops the line to Cell C, suddenly everything works again... why... because the incorrect routing has been flushed.

I'm not saying this is the case, but it's not inconceivable... Vodacom has already proven that they are not 100% stable.

D

Another bolt saga? If I were some techie who botched things up so badly that it brought the network down, I wonder if I would own up or try to spread the blame.

I cant help wonder if this is not somehow related to changes or testing for number portability. Fits in nicely with the routing loop theory too.

damian24 you might have a point there. it goes into a loop and overloads the system

i feel telkom is to blame for this and not cell C!!

neetz108 said:

i feel telkom is to blame for this and not cell C!!

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i know... vodacom now has HSDPA meaning they can use more in less time, meaning they reached their cap on friday so they had to get a new account from telkom, thus taking about an hour to fix.... duhhh