Outages 'caused by variables', says Vumatel as Joburg subscribers experience loss of connectivity

Vumatel fibre subscribers in parts of Johannesburg have complained about having no service from Tuesday evening. 

A subscriber in Marlboro Gardens posted on Twitter that he had no internet on Wednesday and connectivity had still not been restored.

Vumatel replied it was experiencing a network outage in the area and its technicians were making repairs. 

Another subscriber said people in Allen’s Nek and Weltevreden Park in Roodepoort had continuous issues with poor connectivity and huge packet loss throughout the day. The subscriber asked whether Vumatel was still working on the planned maintenance that supposedly ended last Thursday. 

Vumatel replied on Twitter it did an upgrade in the area which will be completed on Friday. 

Other users from Wilgeheuwel, Roodepoort and Sandton also reported problems with connectivity. 

When confronted by a resident of Sharonlea and Olivedale about slow internet speeds, Vumatel said it did not have reported outages in the area. 

The service provider denied there were widespread outages in Johannesburg. It said it experienced an outage late on June 20 only at Florida Lake, resulting in no connectivity.

“Vumatel apologises for inconvenience to users during this period.”

When asked what was the cause of the outage, it said damage to aerial infrastructure at Ontdekkers Road affected the Florida Lake area.

“This is not an unusual occurrence in the fibre network industry, which sees outages caused by several variables during normal operations,” it said. These include:

• scheduled maintenance and network upgrade activities which are communicated in advance to internet service providers;
• emergency maintenance activities;
• outages due to third-party providers (for example, backhaul service providers providing connectivity to Vumatel, which typically face similar risks to their networks as Vumatel does);
• outages due to non-related third parties (for example, water and electricity services) performing work on their infrastructure causing unscheduled outages; as well as
• vandalism and theft on our and third-party service provider infrastructure.

Vumatel said repairs had been completed.

“Vumatel deployed a maintenance team to the affected site and our team has been working to resolve the issue as quickly as possible. New poles and fibre cables have been deployed at the Ontdekkers Road site and technicians are attending to services that have not yet [been] restored.”

As a result, services in Florida Lake were affected by the outage.

 TimesLIVE

Support independent journalism by subscribing to the Sunday Times. Just R20 for the first month.