Vodafone Australia has put a voice outage that hit its network early on January 17, down to an error that occurred during planned work.
While Vodafone has not revealed the nature of the error, a representative for the company has confirmed that it is investigating the outage.
The intermittent outage struck at around 5.30 AM on January 17 and was resolved by 8.10 AM, the company said. It disrupted the network’s voice services, leaving the data services unaffected.
The relatively brief network hit comes five months after the telco offered its customers extra data following a more significant, seven-hour network outage in September last year. That outage occurred after a problem with the router disrupted the company’s 4G services.
The decision by Vodafone to offer customers additional data following the September outage mirrors moves by Australia’s largest telco, Telstra, which offered its own customers free data after its network was hit with a series of outages last year.
While Vodafone is continuing look into its latest network disruption, it stands as a minor incident compared to the string of far-reaching outages suffered by Telstra in 2016.
Not only did Telstra offer customers free data, its chief, Andy Penn, announced in June 2016 that the company would spend $250 million on network improvements following a a review that was commissioned after a nation-wide outage in February 2016.
Telstra subsequently told its shareholders in November last year that it would pump around $1.5 billion into building out its “networks for the future”.
Meanwhile, Vodafone’s latest network hiccup comes just over a month after the telco named Kevin Millroy as its new chief technology officer (CTO). Millroy, who had been acting CT, stepped into the role following the departure of Benoit Hanssen in August last year.
“Kevin knows our network inside out, and has played a critical role in leading the teams which have built the network our customers love and trust,” Vodafone chief executive, Iñaki Berroeta, said at the time.
“As general manager access network delivery, Kevin had responsibility for the rollout of network upgrade and expansion projects including the Mobile Black Spot Program,” he said.
