The Cell Phone Junkie

In light of the recent LTE outages, Verizon released a statement on Thursday, citing growing pains, and more specifically, the IP subsystem as the root issue.  Speaking to GigaOM, VP of Engineering Mike Haberman said all three outages could be traced to an issue with the IP Multimedia Subsystem (IMS), which replaces the old signaling used in legacy networks.  Haberman says the December 7th outage was due to a failure of the back-up communications database, the December 21st outage from an unresponsive IMS element, and the December 28th blackout by two IMS elements not communicating.

Each of the issues was independently resolved, and the three outages were not in any way related.  Verizon says the issues are very much growing pains, and are unfortunately unforeseeable.  Haberman said Verizon has begun segmenting the 4G network into regions around the country, so future bugs will hopefully only take out small areas of the network rather than the entire country.

“Our goal is to ensure that our 4G networks meets the same high standard that our 3G network does,” Haberman told GigaOm. “We’re not there yet, but we’ll get there.”

Press Statement:

In light of recent events, Verizon Wireless shared the following statement about its 4GLTE Network:

The Verizon Wireless 4GLTE Network is BY FAR the largest and the most advanced 4GLTE wireless network in the world. It is available in 190 US markets and covers more than 200 million people, providing the fastest 4G Network in the US.

Being a pioneer comes with growing pains. The recent issues that affected our customers’ 4GLTE service were unforeseen despite careful, diligent planning, deployment and ongoing upgrade programs.

Problems customers experienced affected connectivity to the 4GLTE Network and data service. Several times, we have proactively “moved” 4GLTE customers onto our 3G Network to ensure all would have a data connection. For brief periods, such as on Wednesday (12/28), 4GLTE customers could not connect to the 3G Network as quickly as we would have liked.

Nonetheless, we estimate that 4GLTE connectivity has been available approximately 99 percent of the time this year.

Why have these issues occurred with our 4GLTE Network? Each incident has been different from a technical standpoint. Our engineers have successfully diagnosed those past triggering events, and they have not re-occurred. We also work diligently to rectify technical problems in the Network before they affect any customers.

Our 3G and 1X Networks continue to reliably process calls, texts and data for customers with 3G devices and, when necessary, 4GLTE devices. It continues to perform at the high level that established it as the nation’s largest and most reliable 3G Network.

We are taking a number of steps, working closely with our network suppliers, to ensure the integrity of our 4GLTE Network. We continue to fortify and improve its performance, and our goal is that our 4GLTE Network meets the same high standards that our 3G Network has set for performance and reliability.

Among the numerous measures we have taken or will take are: geographic segmentation, which enables us to isolate, contain and rectify network performance issues, and maintain service to the majority of customers when an issue does develop; and software fixes that we have developed, tested and applied regularly – and will continue to do so. Both will improve performance and reliability.

And finally, we are learning from these issues and applying the same gold standard to our 4GLTE Network that make our 3G Network the nation’s largest and most reliable.

Verizon Wireless is a leader and pioneer in this cutting edge technology that provides very fast wireless data speeds, enabling customers to enjoy the best experience in video and other wireless data usage. Clear unbuffered streaming video, super fast file downloads and wide availability are among the advantages we offer to customers. The capabilities of 4GLTE have exceeded many expectations.

We will not rest until our 4GLTE network performs at the very highest levels that our customers have come to expect from us.