We have a number of sites down in Pretoria and Midrand affecting both voice and data services.  Technicians are on-site, working hard to restore services soon.  

We apologise for the inconvenience and will make an announcement as soon as the problem has been resolved.

Cell C

UPDATE:

We can confirm that voice and data services in Pretoria and Midrand have been restored.  The disruption to our network was caused by a fibre break.  We apologise to our customers for any  inconvenience caused.

Due to a major failure we are having 3g network problems on the East Rand area.  Our technicians are working on restoring the service and we expect resolution in the next 4 hours. 

We apologize for the inconvenience caused.

Cell C is working constantly to improve your network (but we do try to keep maintenance to the hours when you’re asleep!). 

So – we’ll be doing some fixes on Sunday, 1st May, from 1.00 am – 2.00 am. 

If you’re not asleep, and you’re surfing the web or making hoax phone calls – then you are likely to experience some degradation in your service at that time.   Maybe you should catch some zzzzzzz’s while we’re working!

Dear Cell C customers

We sincerely apologise for the network problem you might have experienced this morning.  Due to a routing problem early this morning, Cell C customers had problems making and receiving calls and sending and receiving SMS. The cause of the routing issue, which affected less than 5% of the Cell C customer base, has been identified and was corrected by 09:00 this morning and the network is working as it should. 

Sincerely

Lars P Reichelt

Cell C CEO

We have made a fix on the network and can now confirm an improvement in the call success rate.  We will continue to monitor the network to ensure we experience no additional issues and will make an announcement in this regard.  We apologise again for the inconvenience.

Good morning

We are aware of certain customers experiencing intermittent problems with outbound calls and sms delivery.

Cell C are currently looking into the problem and it should be resolved shortly.

Cell C wishes to alert its customers in the Midrand and Tembisa areas of interruptions to our 2G network due to a Telkom Fibre Break.

Telkom engineers are on site working to restore the feed and we anticipate a fast resolution.

Cell C would like to apologise for the inconvenience caused to its customers.

All, from the CTO of Cell C

It has been a couple of weeks since I have given an update, but I did want to provide a comprehensive update on what has been happening behind the scenes here at Cell C, post our upgrade. The implementation process has been a monumental undertaking, but we knew going into it that the benefits far out-weighed the risks. There have been  some minor issues but these are being addressed and we are close to running at full speed with a much improved customer support solution.

As to the network, several things have been creating some issues in the Gauteng region, we had addressed a major issue a few weeks back with some links but this was not the base of the problem. We have continued the investigations  with our vendor and we have identified a bug in the Base Station software when interacting with Release 7 devices (the new high speed devices) such as our 5GB Black Dongle, and some of the newest generation Handsets. This bug caused the Base Station to interpret certain types of messages used to setup the connection incorrectly putting the Base Station into a slumber state with very low throughput or connection problems. As more users attempted connections after this first event the Base Station’s performance would decline rapidly until it was totally locked. A patch was developed for this by our vendor and installed in the GP region last night, this should solve a majority of the issues recorded but we are continuing our quest to ensure network coverage nationwide is back to super wooosh speeds.

I apologize for the time it took to identify the issue, it was very complex and required some in-depth work between the Cell C team and our vendor to identify and then develop the software correction.

Thank you for your continued support and for your feedback that you have been sending through! Keep it coming.

Regards

Ron

CTO Cell C

Some post-paid customers are experiencing issues related to retrieving airtime balances off their handsets. Our technical team are working on a resolution, in the interim customers are asked to please dial 084 14302 for balance enquiries.

Between the hours of midnight and 6am, 3 March 2011, we will be doing important upgrades and maintenance on 5 high traffic radio network controllers in the Durban, Cape Town and Johannesburg areas.

Interruptions can be expected from around 1am.

There will also be software upgrades of certain 3G base stations to fix certain noted customer issues on the black Huawei Cell C modems. Only slight interruptions can be expected from this activity.