The company reported this morning that it “has now fully resolved the technical issues that impacted its network including all 3G and 4G+ voice and data services”.
CEO Ian Gray said: “We strive to provide our customers with world-class service every day and the outage of our network is most disappointing to us and our customers.”
All networks – including 2G and 3G as well as 4G – went down on Monday 17 July after a network upgrade affected the company’s home location register.
“The equipment failure took place during a network upgrade and extended to the network back-up and redundancy systems,” said Vodafone Qatar, in which Vodafone group has a 23% stake.
Customers reported the 2G service was back in operation the following day, but restoration of 3G services took until Thursday and the 4G network has only just been fixed.
Qatar’s Communications Regulatory Authority (CRA) last week demanded a detailed account of the failure, but neither the CRA nor Vodafone Qatar responded to Capacity’s requests for information about whether this has been delivered.
Vodafone Qatar said it “is now taking further measures to enhance its network resiliency with new hardware and software that exceeds industry standards”. During the outage it “deployed all available resource to restore full connectivity across the network with the support of network experts who flew into Qatar from Vodafone Group”, said the company.
Gray added: “The road to progress is lined with challenges but despite what has happened, we are inspired by the spirit of our country, Qatar, and the strength of our dedicated team. We want to assure customers that we are stronger now that we’ve made it through.” He said the company was launching a loyalty programme.
