CANBERRA: Vodafone Australia has confirmed that a 4G mobile outage affecting data, voice, and text messages occurred over the weekend, with most services restored as of 1:30am AEST on Monday morning. The 4G outage, which began around 6.30pm AEST on Sunday night, was caused by a router issue, according to the telecommunications carrier. This subsequently led to such a high number of customers attempting to use the 2G and 3G networks, with a high level of congestion following.
A “residual issue from the original incident” is causing some customers to continue experiencing the network disruption. “At around 6.30pm yesterday, we experienced an issue which impacted part of our network, resulting in intermittent disruption to voice, text, and data services,” a Vodafone spokesperson said. “Mobile services were progressively restored from 10.45pm, with the majority of customers fully restored at 1.35am. “A small portion of our customer base is this morning reporting some continued intermittent disruption to services. We are working to restore these customers’ mobile experience as soon as possible.”
Vodafone’s 4G network covers 95.3 percent of the Australian population, or 23 million people — a 40 percent rise in its network size over the past four years. The telco in May announced that it will spend AU$9 million on constructing 32 new mobile base stations in regional areas.
In a bid to continue expanding its 4G network, Vodafone purchased AU$68 million worth of 1800MHz spectrum earlier this year; refarmed its 850MHz spectrum band to bring coverage to regional and metropolitan Queensland, New South Wales, and the Australian Capital Territory; and proposed to the Australian government that it be permitted to pay AU$594.3 million for 2x 10MHz in the 700MHz spectrum band that was unsold in the 2013 auction.
