Vodacom Network Outage - Update

Vodacom's subscribers affected by a network outage should now see their service being restored.  The cause of the outage, which affected subscribers in selected spots across the country, was a multiple failure of transmission system equipment.  This transmission system provides the connectivity to support the wireless network.  The transmission failure, which occurred late this morning, had a knock-on effect on other areas of the network.  This resulted in an overall degradation of service.

Speaking about the outage, Chief Technical Officer Andries Delport said

We're currently working flat out to get service restored to all customers as quickly as possible.  We expect that network congestion could persist into this evening but are confident that it will subside quickly.  From here we will be running a full investigation into the cause of the failure and more importantly how we can further improve network redundancy.  We apologise to every customer who has been affected.  What happened today was not acceptable and we will make sure that we do everything possible to avoid a recurrence.

Discussing the overall plans for the network, Delport said

We are spending more than R6 billion on our network in South Africa this year to improve our service to all customers. We will be increasing the number of 3G base stations and adding significantly to our own transmission network capacity. 

ENDS