O2 replaces Ericsson solution following outage

The UK arm of Telefonica, O2 has announced it will stop using Ericsson’s Central User Database, blaming the solution for recent network outages.

It said that it would splash out a sizeable £10m to replace the solution with the latest version of the Home Location Register (HLR) database solution, which will also be supplied by Ericsson.

The operator experienced an outage earlier this month; the second such network failure in recent months. Derek McManus, COO at O2, said that the firm is disappointed to have let customers down again.

“Two network faults in a short space of time is unsatisfactory. We took important steps with our supplier after the outage in July to prevent a similar fault happening again, and while this issue was not on the same scale, it did impact our customers,” he said.

He added that O2 will also continue to invest £1.5m a day on building out and improving its network.

“We are up-weighting and re-focussing our Service Experience Team to be solely dedicated to ensuring the highest level of customer network experience while we go through this period of unprecedented investment, culminating in the delivery of our 4G service,” McManus added. “Their performance will now be measured on customers’ confidence in our network.”

Ericsson said that it worked closely with O2 to identify any contributing factors and “immediately took necessary actions”. The Swedish vendor said that the fault was fixed on the same afternoon.

“The issue was identified to be related to how the equipment was configured,” the firm said in a statement. “O2 are moving to classic HLR which Ericsson has provided for many years in the network and continues to do so. We continue to work closely with O2 to ensure that service integrity is maintained.”