Verizon fast-tracks upgrades

By Candice Jones, ITWeb online telecoms editor

Johannesburg, 31 Oct 2007

Verizon has accelerated upgrades to its core network, following a spate of network failures.

"These upgrades have been in the pipeline for a while, and the next phase of the upgrade should be complete by the end of the week," says Edwin Thompson, senior executive for operations, regulatory and legal at Verizon Business SA.

Thompson says the upgrades will transform the backbone to run different interfaces to ensure such occurrences do not arise again.

"Most of the core network has been running on proprietary equipment and our upgrades will change this. For example, we will be replacing proprietary fibre with non-proprietary within the infrastructure."

Last week, the company`s network was running at a lower capacity than usual, causing slower access or downtime for several customers on the Gallo Manor node. The disruption was caused by a hardware fault on the senior backbone network in Johannesburg.

"Technically, the equipment should not have failed, because there is a fail-over. However, this router was receiving inaccurate messages and the device impacted on several others."

Thompson says Verizon engineers made the necessary changes to alleviate the problem and the network was stabilised. "It took some time to find the faulty device and that is why the networks were under capacity for a while."

Verizon says the network has been running smoothly since 10am on 26 October and business operations have returned to normal.

In August, a downed peering point between Verizon and Telkom disrupted services to thousands of Internet users.