Verizon displays growing pains after recovering from LTE outage

US carrier Verizon Wireless restored LTE service across the country yesterday after suffering an outage, the third it has experienced this year. On Wednesday this week, its LTE customers found that they were unable to connect to the high-speed network, with devices falling back to 3G speeds or slower.

Yesterday the carrier released a statement that read, “Verizon Wireless’ 4G LTE service returned to normal Wednesday evening after the company’s network operations team resolved a technical issue.  Some 4G customers had reported intermittent or unavailable 4G service, or devices operating on 3G, for periods of time starting late Tuesday. Throughout this time, all customers were able to make voice calls, send and receive text messages, and 3G data devices operated normally.”

Verizon launched LTE in December 2010 across 30 cities, but suffered a first outage In April this year lasting 24-hours, with a second one hit in October. This third one could cause issues for the company which bills itself in the US as, “America’s fasters, most reliable 4G network.”

In the April outage it was confirmed by Verizon that an IMS software bug caused the issue. However, there was no mention of exactly has caused the problem this time around, with GigaOm in the US suggesting that it could have been problem with the radio network.

Verizon is due to expand to 190 markets in the US, making it by far the largest LTE deployment in the world. Regional carrier Metro PCS offers an LTE service, while Verizon major rival AT&T launches its LTE service in September this year.

The next LTE conference is LTE Latin America 2012, taking place on the 17-18 April 2012,at the Windsor Barra Hotel, Rio de Janeiro, Brasil. Go to the website to register your interest.