Verizon Wireless was the first major carrier to launch its super fast 4G LTE network in the United States. Being the first comes with its fair share of problems, however. Earlier this week Verizon’s 4G LTE network suffered its third major outage in the month of December. In an interview with GigaOM, Verizon Wireless vice president of Network Engineering Mike Haberman responded with:
Being the pioneers, we’re going to experience some growing pains. These issues we’ve been experiencing are certainly regrettable but they were unforeseeable.
Haberman went on to blame all three outages on the process of replacing old signaling architectures used in 2G and 3G networks while on 4G, known as the IP Multimedia Subsystem (IMS). Ever since April, IMS has caused problems leading to network failures. After fixing various software bugs, users were able to again reconnect to 3G EV-DO and 4G LTE services. However, the IMS glitches returned in December and have caused the company headaches. The first outage on December 7th was caused by the failure of a back-up communications database. The second, last week, was the result of an IMS element not responding properly, while Wednesday’s outage was caused by two IMS elements not communicating properly, Haberman told GigaOM. In a statement released by the company, Verizon says that it will not rest until their 4G LTE network performs at the highest levels that customers have come to expect.
