This morning Neotel suffered a major network failure resulting in a lengthy outage that has severely disrupted telecommunication services in the Johannesburg metropolitan area. It appears that a motor vehicle crashed into a telephone pole that carries the main Neotel optic fibre link between their data center in Johannesburg and the Sandton CBD.

Andy Openshaw, Chief Commercial Officer for ECN, says: “The outage brought down a significant number of our customers resulting in them being unable to make telephone calls or access data services. We are currently assessing the financial damage to our business, but it is likely that it will run into hundreds of thousands of rand.”

“It appears that this crucial link is neither self healing nor fully meshed”, says Mike Britz, COO of ECN. According to Britz, “ECN was not notified by Neotel of the network failure and had to diagnose the problem itself. We have also battled without much success to get any feedback from Neotel and they appear to have no automated redundancy or back-up plan in place.”

John Holdsworth, CEO, of ECN, says: “This type of network failure clearly illustrates why VANS should be allowed to self provide their own networks. It is totally unacceptable that we should be forced to lease capacity from operators who are apparently unable to meet accepted standards of service. ECN currently routes voice and data traffic for many of South Africa’s top companies and we cannot have disruptions, which impact our customers’ crucial business operations.”