Vodafone 3G returns after three-hour Auckland outage
Vodafone's 3G network is coming back online after a hardware failure that saw central Auckland and North Shore subscribers lose connections for close to three hours.
External communications manager Paul Brislen says the equipment failure hit just before lunchtime.
Initially the telco thought the problem covered a large swathe of the North Island, and placed a message in its help forum saying:
We are currently experiencing issues with 3G Voice and Data issue in the upper North Island (Ellerslie to Northland).
However, Mr Brislen says the problem was experienced by central Auckland and some North Shore subscribers only.
The outage affected 3G voice calls and data. Voice calls should have automatically tripped down to 2.5G, but Mr Brislen says the 2.5G network was soon overwhelmed by the surge in traffic, with most calls going straight to voice mail (though two NBR writers found service dropped out altogether).
When NBR spoke to Mr Brislen at 2.45pm, a hardware “reboot” was bringing the 3G network back online, with full service expected to return around 3pm. In parts of central Auckland it had resumed by 2.50pm.
Vodafone's outage caps a lousy couple of months for connectivity of all kinds, with Telecom and TelstraClear also suffering major outages recently.
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Comments and questions3
Phones will only drop back to the gprs network (in no means a 2.5g one since there is no edge in nz) if you have allowed the handset to do so. That is an option on the handset (except the iphone stupidly enough) which is commonly turned on by people since vodafone have a habit of kicking you down to 2g when you start to actually use the phone, if you take a voice call you lose all your data connections.
This is one big bonus of telecoms new network, if you have an iphone you won't have to suffer the fallback to 2g all the time.
Another nail in vodafones coffin IMO.
This problem is not resolved and is ongoing in Auckland and Wellington CBD. Vodafone's 3G network falls over regularly during business hours resulting in missed calls, txt's delayed by hours and no data connectivity.
Vodafone are keeping quiet on their own forums. Surprised the media won't report the issue.
Vodafone su**s . People hassle XT but Voda is worse! Mine has been out for 3 days!
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