Monkagedi Gaotlhobogwe
2 April 2009
Cell phone giant, Orange Botswana, says it will soon compensate customers following outages encountered by Orange subscribers for two days.
Orange Botswana spokesman, Karabo Tlhabiwe, says they are yet to finalise how the compensation will be rolled out, but he emphasised that it will be done soon.
Explaining the outage experienced last week, Tlhabiwe said the technical problem was encountered at a time when Orange was busy upgrading or enhancing its inter-connectivity with various mobile, and telephony service providers.
Tlhabiwe said after the exercise, known as signalling, it was realised that some of Orange's network nodes were corrupted, resulting in the outage on Friday at 11:45am.
The services were partially restored later that day, but Orange still had some services that were not aligned fully. Customers could not check their balance, or recharge their phones, while data services and GPRS were also not available. Full functionality was restored on Saturday at 10am.
The problem affected mainly Orange customers in Mahalapye, Gantsi and Gaborone including the major and minor towns around these areas. The northern part of the country from Palapye northward was not affected.
Tlhabiwe said Orange Botswana took the outage very seriously and worked tirelessly to restore service to clients. He said the management of Orange Botswana - France Telcom and Ericsson - conducted conference calls every hour attempting to solve the problem while the heads of technical teams also had conference calls every 30 minutes trouble-shooting the problem that had transpired.
Tlhabiwe said they tapped into their Ericsson International 24hr remote support.
"Orange have an agreement to always have a 24hrs remote support facility that can assist with troubleshooting network issues and cases such as these when they arise", Tlhabiwe said, adding that they sought help from Ericsson Support in Australia, Hungary, and Canada.
The company says to avert the same disaster happening in future, Orange is developing a fully autonomous Home Locater Register (HLR's) that they can have on either side of the Botswana regions, north and south.
" Ensuring that in the event that one may have some issues we can clearly channel the traffic to the other without any effect on the customers," Tlhabiwe said.
The company says they continue to investigate what led to the corruption of the system last week, with the view to sharing it with other Orange partners so that they know how to deal with the problem when it occurs in any Orange operation around the world.
Be the first to Write a Comment!
Copyright © 2009 Mmegi/The Reporter. All rights reserved. Distributed by AllAfrica Global Media (allAfrica.com). To contact the copyright holder directly for corrections — or for permission to republish or make other authorized use of this material, click here.
AllAfrica aggregates and indexes content from over 125 African news organizations, plus more than 200 other sources, who are responsible for their own reporting and views. Articles and commentaries that identify allAfrica.com as the publisher are produced or commissioned by AllAfrica.
