Verizon Data Outage Brings Misery to Customers
Verizon wireless, the nation’s largest wireless network provider, has experienced a widespread data outage on Wednesday, the second outage to hit the company this month.
Wireless subscribers nationwide experienced unreliable data connections, according to reports posted on many internet forums and also on Twitter.
The problem with the company's 3G and 4G wireless service caused service interruptions everywhere from California to New York.
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"Verizon Wireless 4G LTE service is returning to normal this morning, after company engineers worked to resolve an issue with the 4G network during the early morning hours," a Verizon spokesman told ZD Net in an emailed statement.
This latest network disruption comes just weeks after a similar situation in which the company's 4G LTE service saw widespread outages.
"Throughout this time, 4G LTE customers were able to make voice calls and send and receive text messages. The 3G data network operated normally," a Verizon spokesman said in the statement.
"LTE is still a relatively new technology, so it will take some time to mature. But that isn't really any excuse," Zeus Kerravala, principal analyst at ZK Research, said.
In April, Verizon experienced outages across the nation that drew the scorn of its customers. And in fact Wednesday's issue was Verizon's second outage event in December.
"Verizon is looking to add core services to LTE, including voice, and I suspect they need to get the reliability of 4G to a higher level before they could roll out voice on top of it," Kerravala said.
Users reported problems with the LTE network in the first week of the month. That outage reportedly left customers without Internet access on their smartphones for almost about 24 hours.
According to The Washington Post, on Dec. 7, Verizon experienced similar problems with its 4G network. Earlier this year, Verizon introduced a "network optimization" plan to help manage the number of heavy data consumers. This essentially limits the bandwidth for the top data users.
