Verizon's been having a lousy month. On top of the PR disaster of introducing a new $2 service fee for paying bills online, the wireless carrier with the reputation for having the best service suffered no less than three outages for its ultra-fast 4G LTE data network. Now the company has finally come forward and explained itself. Each of the outages was caused by an separate bug, Verizon says, though none as serious as the one that took down the entire network for an extended period in April. Now Verizon says it's taking a key step to prevent nationwide LTE outages: geo-segmentation. By partitioning the network by area, the carrier can isolate problems before they spread and take down the whole system.
[More from Mashable: Verizon Kills $2 Fee Plan Amid Consumer Outrage]
The April ?berbug was caused by a bug in the very core of the network, IP Multimedia Subsystem (IMS), Verizon vice president of network engineering Mike Haberman revealed to GigaOm. All of this month's outages also involved issues with the IMS, though none were quite as fundamental to the system's operation as the one in April.
The first outage this month happened on Dec. 7 when an IMS backup database failed. The second, on Dec. 20, was caused by a key network element not responding properly. And for the third, which occurred this past Wednesday, two network elements weren't communicating right.
[More from Mashable: Verizon Customers Suffer Third Outage in December [VIDEO]]
Although customers' phones should automatically switch to 3G signals when LTE isn't functioning, that didn't happen for some customers. That was because of the nature of an IMS failure -- the network is still transmitting radio signals just fine, it just can't recognize devices running on it. Verizon was eventually able to force those phones to switch to 3G, but not right away.
Although Verizon says it take outages seriously, it makes no guarantees that more of them won't occur. Verizon's 4G LTE network is the world's largest, and the carrier says these kind of outages are simply par for the course when you're pioneering a next-generation wireless network. LTE is a generational shift in data networking technology, and Verizon was the first carrier to deploy it in the United States. AT&T has since followed with its own LTE network, and Sprint plans to debut the tech in 2012.
Were you affected by Verizon's disabled LTE service? Has it changed your thoughts on the carrier in any way? Let us know in the comments.
Image courtesy of Eric Hauser, Flickr
This story originally published on Mashable here.
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