There was a service outage yesterday from 10am to 5pm for Umobile users, where they cannot access calls and the internet at all. This didn't affect my calls and what not as I wasn't a umobile user, BUT it did affect me indirectly as some of my clients WERE Umobile users. I couldn't get to them, I couldn't contact them for urgent matters, and it got really frustrating.
Was this an isolated case? We don't know. What we DO know, is that the network went down nationwide, and from an analysis done by those higher-ups, it happened because key HLR database was corrupted, which is supplied by the Chinese vendor ZTE, leading to paralysis of the whole network.
How could this happen? Isn't ZTE a highly qualified vendor? Well, some undisclosed western industry experts pointed out that it is not surprising that it should happen after so long.
From the ZTE accident analysis, the reliability and maturity of ZTE’s HLR needs to be verified in existing networks if any Operator decides to choose ZTE. ZTE's latest HLR FE has been switched from V3 to ATCA hardware, but up to now, there are few commercial applications which are using this version, so potential problems are not fully exposed.
So what are we to do now? If ZTE is not reliable, then switch vendors, so there will be less downtime all around.
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