Late last month Verizon's shiny new cutting-edge LTE wireless broadband network took a bit of a PR hit when the
entire network went down for more than a day for many of its users. Verizon still isn't saying what caused the outage, which forced USB modem users offline entirely, and resulted in those who paid for the new HTC Thunderbolt LTE-capable smartphone to connect at 1XRRT speeds. Brian Higgins, Verizon Wireless' executive director for LTE Ecosystem Development, stated this week at a conference that whatever the problem was, it's fixed and
won't happen again:
Higgins didn't reveal any details about what caused the outage or which of its vendors were responsible, but he said that the issue was fixed and VZW has taken steps to ensure it wouldn’t happen again. "Certainly there are going to be some lessons learned," Higgins said. "We’re going to make some adjustments, and some of those adjustments have already been made. … It was an important issue. We worked through them. Our vendors were very responsive."
At least
one user in our forums was told that the outage was due to a nationwide failure of the authentication server for LTE users. Morgan Keegan analyst Simon Leopold blamed Nokia, insisting the outage was caused by an NSN element in the IMS system used to manage subscriber activity within the core network.
