Network issues hit Optus-Vodafone as 3G service goes down

Lengthy outages on Sydneys Northern Beaches recently left customers of Optus reporting loss of their services as the telco struggled to maintain its 3G mobile broadband data service.

After a recent failed upgrade to one of the towers that serve the Bilgola Plateau, which is the region south of Avalon, it took the mobile carrier five days to restore access to the services. Vodafone users that had also been using the tower for the last 18 months to access their 3G data service only had a partial return of their service after maintenance work had been carried out, said Optus.

A spokesman for Vodafone said that a minor software configuration issue was the cause of the problem. Service to the tower did, however, take five days to be returned. A company spokeswoman did say that Optus “has received no customer reports as a result of this issue.”

The issue had been raised with Optus who sent engineers from Optus to assess and repair the fault but were initially unsuccessful in fixing the problem, said the spokesman. He also added “The customer complaints from Vodafone customers certainly were logged and …did precipitate part of our response mechanism in raising the remediation ticket for Optus to investigate.”

Customers were advised by Vodafone that voice services could still be obtain by changing their handset settings over to GSM although this would render their access to 3G services inoperable. There was a little confusion for many customers though when Vodafone customer service representatives advised that 3G data services would be restored without the need for users to escalate the issue.

The Optus-Vodafone mobile network has recently been hit by a series of outages. In August and recently three states and ACT lost access to the 3G service provided by Optus and reports that Adelaide and Sydney had their services taken down by a computer failure.

There is currently a desperate bid for the mobile infrastructure shared by Vodafone and Optus to have its 3G upgraded and coverage for its high speed packet access to be expanded to allow it to match Telstra’s Next G network. Although the recent outages surfacing on the 3G network may be related to the schedule of rapid upgrades nothing is clear at the moment.