Neotel fixes network glitch

By Candice Jones for Neotel

Johannesburg, 31 Oct 2008

Neotel has confirmed it experienced a generalised network failure this morning, which it says caused an outage for certain customers in the Johannesburg area.

Neotel executive head of strategy Angus Hay explains that customers experienced a break in service when one of the optic fibre backbone cables was damaged. “This resulted in a localised interruption of services to enterprise clients in that area, as well as some of the CDMA towers as this is a fairly major route.”

He says the service was restored within two hours, which is the stipulated window period on Neotel's service licence agreement with its customers.

This appears to be the first major network trouble the company has experienced since it launched its business service last year. However, one client says the disruption is unacceptable.

Conflicted clients

ECN, a Neotel customer, says the outage lasted from around 9:45am until after 1:30pm today, which ECN COO Mike Britz says is unacceptable. “The downtime had a real impact on Neotel's business customers. They only managed to re-route the services this afternoon.”

According to Britz, ECN and its customers had difficulty contacting the Neotel call centre and were forced to diagnose the problem themselves. “Some kind of car or truck drove into the pole that holds one of the main links to the company's core network,” he says.

“It appears that this crucial link is neither self healing nor fully meshed”, says Britz. He adds that the company has experienced patchy service from Neotel and has decided to switch providers.

John Holdsworth, CEO of ECN, says: “This type of network failure clearly illustrates why VANS should be allowed to self provide their own networks. It is totally unacceptable that we should be forced to lease capacity from operators who are apparently unable to meet accepted standards of service.”

However, another client, Vox Telecoms, has not had the same problems. The company says the network did experience a hiccup this morning, however, the company says it does not consider the problem a network failure.