Verizon Wireless customers began reporting outages to 4G Long-Term Evolution (LTE) services early Feb. 22.
The issue doesn’t appear to be regional; subscribers in Michigan, Arizona and Virginia have posted messages to Verizon forums, Cnet reported. Additionally, Engadget heard from unhappy Verizon customers in Indiana, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania and Ohio.
"VZW is investigating customer issues in connecting to the 4GLTE data network. 3G data, voice and text services are operating reliably," Verizon Tweeted at 10:10 a.m. on Feb. 22.
Despite Verizon suggesting that only its 4G service has been affected, subscribers are Tweeting that 3G data is also hurting.
In December 2011, Verizon customers dealt with two outages to 3G and 4G networks, the second coming after the one-year anniversary of its 4G LTE launch. The outages were caused by bugs in Verizon’s core service-delivery architecture, GigaOm reported. While Verizon said at the time that it couldn’t promise that no more outages would occur, Mike Haberman, vice president of networking engineering, said the carrier was taking steps to segment its LTE network so that software bugs would be isolated to a region and unable to spread.
As of Verizon’s Jan. 24 earnings call for its 2011 fourth-quarter — its best quarter ever for LTE device sales — the carrier offered 20 4G LTE smartphones and data devices, with more on the way.
"We are by far the market leader in 4G LTE, which is now available in 195 markets covering more than 200 million POPs, with increasing customer awareness of its superior speeds, capabilities and new high-quality devices," CFO Fran Shammo said during the call.
During the quarter, Verizon sold 1.6 million LTE smartphones and activated 4.3 million Apple iPhones devices that AT&T notoriously struggled to support.
To read the original eWeek article, click here: Verizon 4G LTE Outage Widespread, Being Investigated
