Verizon discusses their recent outages

Verizon Wireless said that the service outage that occurred earlier in the week occurred because of “growing pains” relating to the 4G LTE network.

The service outages affected Verizon Wireless customers all across the United States earlier in the week. According to EWeek, Verizon released a statement on December 29. The carrier said that the problems with the 4G LTE service were unforeseen, even after careful planning. There were also customers who experienced problems with their 3G connection. The statement also said that the 4G LTE had been available most of the time this year. Verizon said the service was working 99 percent of the time. The VP of network engineering at Verizon Wireless is Mike Haberman. Haberman said that LTE is still very new and the company is the first global carrier to launch LTE on a huge scale. Haberman said that it makes sense that they would be the first to experience glitches and bugs that are hidden. Haberman went onto say that the problems that occurred are regrettable, according to Gigaom. The three outages that the company dealt with was caused by issues in the company’s service delivery core, which is an in telecom-speak that is called IP Multimedia Subsystem. IMS replaces old signaling components that were used in the 2G and 3G networks. IMS has been around for quite some time but Verizon is the first company to implement it into an LTE network. Ever since April, the implementation has been giving the company problems when a bug found deep within the core of IMS caused complete failure. LTE customers ended up being booted off of Verizon’s 3G and 4G networks. According to ZDNET, Verizon said that they have taken numerous of actions and will take more actions that will help them isolate and fix performance problems in the network. The company also said they have developed software fixes that they have tested and applied regularly. The company went onto say that performance and reliability will improve. Verizon said that they will work endlessly until the 4GLTE network performs at the best levels because that is what customers expect of the company.