Roaming in Australia unavailable

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#102706 3-Jan-2008 14:23

freitasm:
brad_p: ... but still in the grand scheme of things this isn't really a major outage as you could just change networks and your phone would (should?) work as per normal.

An outage that goes for more than one week preventing people travelling to New Zealand's biggest destination to cal back home during Christmas and New Year and you don't think it is a major outage?

Not everyone is savvy enough to know that they would have to manually change networks.

This is a major outage and in the wrong time of the year.

I am not blaming Vodafone New Zealand, but action should have been taken a long time ago as soon as this started showing up.

Once again the large corporations here in New Zealand fail to correctly inform customers of what's going on and how to rectify. The time that took for this probem to be acknowledged was too long.

And if it's true that a firewall is causing this problem, what's the root cause? Who changed the firewall rules or who implemented it? Bring this people to the wall!

What Im saying is that this is being blown out of proportion - I am under the impression that if you change networks then that will fix the problem and you can use your phone normally. Network selections aren't hard. Perhaps VF should be telling their customer how to do this through their CSRs or the home page of their website

DoggNZ

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#102708 3-Jan-2008 14:31

Anyone know if this issue is resolved yet? I'm off to Oz in 3 weeks and really want people to be able to get hold of me.

zocster

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#102711 3-Jan-2008 14:37

Services        2G & 3G Voice, Data & Video Calls
Area Affect     Vodafone Australia
Outage Start Time       03/01/2008 07:00
Expected Time to Restore (ETR) No ETR
Problem Description     Connection to the Network is lost at Vodafone Australia and effects Vodafone New Zealand and Vodafone Fiji.

Update 5: The Problem is now only with provisioning and not with voice traffic as stated before. Techs still investigating the issue.

Restoration Time        03/01/2008 12:10
Resolution Information Secondry Firewall Implemented which fixed the whole problem and everything is now back up and working.

It should be fixed sometime today one would hope by the sound of this last one.

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#102712 3-Jan-2008 14:40

zocster: Services 2G & 3G Voice, Data & Video Calls
Area Affect Vodafone Australia
Outage Start Time 03/01/2008 07:00
Expected Time to Restore (ETR) No ETR
Problem Description Connection to the Network is lost at Vodafone Australia and effects Vodafone New Zealand and Vodafone Fiji.
Update 5: The Problem is now only with provisioning and not with voice traffic as stated before. Techs still investigating the issue.

Restoration Time 03/01/2008 12:10
Resolution Information Secondry Firewall Implemented which fixed the whole problem and everything is now back up and working.

It should be fixed sometime today one would hope by the sound of this last one.

If this is the same issue... then what does a firewall issue have to do with international congestion that vodafones being saying?

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#102713 3-Jan-2008 14:41

brad_p: Selecting networks manually was the first thing I tried - this didn't work either. Although my phone could "see" Optus/Telstra, it could not connect to either of those either. So no phone service at all for me, maybe not even in an emergency (obviously I couldn't test that bit out!).

I'm pleased this story has now made it into the news. When I started this thread I didn't expect the problems to last anywhere near as long as this or affect so many people. I just hope that VFAU (and other concerned parties) can learn from this and get it right next time!

Each time I spoke to cust. services about this issue, I suggested to them that they put some sort of notification on their website if this was going to affect a lot of people. I was assured by them that they would arrange this. Did it happen? No. Result: more angry and confused customers!

I'll be on the phone to customer services this avo in search of some compensation anyway.

freitasm

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#102723 3-Jan-2008 15:04

brad_p: I am under the impression that if you change networks then that will fix the problem and you can use your phone normally. Network selections aren't hard. Perhaps VF should be telling their customer how to do this through their CSRs or the home page of their website

Changing network *is* hard. Some people don't know how to do it and so many old phones are still connected that it would be impossible to a CSR to know instructions for all of them.

Try explaining my parents-in-law how to change network on their phones - they don't even know what a network is.

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#102724 3-Jan-2008 15:07

zocster: Services        2G & 3G Voice, Data & Video Calls
Area Affect     Vodafone Australia
Outage Start Time       03/01/2008 07:00
Expected Time to Restore (ETR) No ETR
Problem Description     Connection to the Network is lost at Vodafone Australia and effects Vodafone New Zealand and Vodafone Fiji.
Update 5: The Problem is now only with provisioning and not with voice traffic as stated before. Techs still investigating the issue.

Restoration Time        03/01/2008 12:10
Resolution Information Secondry Firewall Implemented which fixed the whole problem and everything is now back up and working.

It should be fixed sometime today one would hope by the sound of this last one.

Where are you getting this information from? Someone from Vodafone contacted me and told he had no idea what is this about - although the problem description and resolution seems reasonable to me, Vodafone NZ staff seem to be running around trying to find explanations.

Like it or not Vodafone apologist, PR folks, management team and technicians I qualify this now as "Worst PR and technical disaster so far in 2008" and we are only on 3rd of January.

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#102725 3-Jan-2008 15:07

Another blog article on it. It seems the Optus stunt is wearing thin.

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#102727 3-Jan-2008 15:08

brad_p:
What Im saying is that this is being blown out of proportion - I am under the impression that if you change networks then that will fix the problem and you can use your phone normally. Network selections aren't hard. Perhaps VF should be telling their customer how to do this through their CSRs or the home page of their website

I don't think the problem is being blown out of proportion at all - I think the problem has actually never received the publicity of action it should have done by Vodafone and it's obviously helped that all the media in NZ have been asleep or away on holiday because this problem has now been happening for 10 days and today is the first they have picked up on it.

Remember 75% of VF's customer base is PrePay - PrePay customers have automatic roaming enabled to Australia but can only roam on the VF Australia network and can't change networks to fix the issue.

The local media have been very slow on picking up a problem that reastically is (from what I was told) around 10000 VFNZ customers who are at present roaming in Australia. That is not an insignificant number of customers to be affected and Vodafone have done little to inform those people. Vodafone should have been advising people through the most logical place people would have looked - their website. Obviously they have chosen not to do this and instead hid behind the "it's nothing to do with us" statement.

I know people in Australia seriously affected by the lack of inbound calls. You couldn't even buy a new SIM there and forward calls from NZ to the Aussie number because you couldn't connect to the VF network to connect and do this and CSR's have obviously not been kept up to date with what is actually heppening. It wasn't VF's problem so I don't blame them for the fault but it should be a very good training exercise for them on how not to handle such a thing should it happen again.

cranz

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#102728 3-Jan-2008 15:08

freitasm:
brad_p: I am under the impression that if you change networks then that will fix the problem and you can use your phone normally. Network selections aren't hard. Perhaps VF should be telling their customer how to do this through their CSRs or the home page of their website

Changing network *is* hard. Some people don't know how to do it and so many old phones are still connected that it would be impossible to a CSR to know instructions for all of them.

Try explaining my parents-in-law how to change network on their phones - they don't even know what a network is.

By this logic, most users phones would be on automatic selection anyway and try the other networks... if you know how to manually select VF AU only I'm sure you know how to select a different network from the list..

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#102729 3-Jan-2008 15:14

cranz: By this logic, most users phones would be on automatic selection anyway and try the other networks... if you know how to manually select VF AU only I'm sure you know how to select a different network from the list..

I have lots of respect for what you post here, but I think you are showing little knowledge of your user base. Are you sure people know how to use their phones? I would say only a minority knows and if presented with an option to select Optus or Telstra they would be terrorised of selecting anything - many don't know that there are different costs when roaming in other networks and many have their handsets configured to manual select.

I think you are saying all Vodafone customers are tech savvy people? But this discussion would be off topic.

So far we have a few explanations going on:

Paul Brislen says it's network congestion.
Others point out to Optus problems
Others refer to an e-mail update with Vodafone acknowledging there are firewall problems.

Are we going to see the end of this soon?

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#102731 3-Jan-2008 15:19

Hi I work for a company that uses Vodafone as the main supplier of services. hence the email notifications. I thought they were keeping us in the loop but when it actually happened on 26th of december, it just sucks. They should really be more on the ball!!

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#102732 3-Jan-2008 15:22

What amuses me most about this whole spectacle is that they are in effect passing the buck onto this 'other' weird foriegn network "Vodafone Australia" like they are completely seperate.

I thought the whole point of a consolidation in worldwide telecommunications was economy and efficiently of scale. Of being able to sort problems out quicker and easier because you are part of one big happy family, and can pick up
the phone and cut through the red tape of dealing with a different company/technicians/technical standards/politics.

It appears Vodafone Worldwide have achieved the exact oposite that consolidation was meant to achieve, buck passing, red tape and isolated networks not working well together - Well done.

I never throught someone could make Telecom look so good, but with Vodafone constantly breaking their own network, all Telecom has to do is oh, absolutely nothing to look like the technical champion! A sad state of affairs.

At least Telecom has the balls to step up to the plate and take responsibility for their outages.

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#102733 3-Jan-2008 15:27

Regarding those outage emails. The question I have is: are they related? I have an "understanding" that they might be referring to another event.

And why are they posted (they are not intended to be released into the public, and are usually only sent to staff members or corporates) in the first instance?

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zocster

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#102734 3-Jan-2008 15:33

I believe they are related, and I won't be posting any more updates!!

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