O2 is planning to spend £10m to rip out core Ericsson database technology from its network and replace it with an alternative solution, after its network went down earlier this week for the second time in four months.
The mobile giant’s chief operating officer Derek McManus has confirmed that O2 had taken action with its supplier after the first outage in July, to prevent a similar fault happening again.
In a blog post, McManus said: “We are removing the Central User Database provided by one of our suppliers, which has suffered two different faults in the last few months. We are not prepared to risk this happening to our customers for a third time and are implementing a proven alternative solution.”
McManus said that O2 was committing an additional spend of £10m on this change, and would also continue to invest £1.5m a day on building and improving its network.
“While we recognise that we have dented the confidence and trust of some of our customers, I hope this plan will demonstrate our commitment to rebuilding that trust,” said McManus.
“We will not rest until we have cemented the stability of our network and can deliver the level of service customers have come to expect of us over the last ten years.”
The latest outage occurred earlier this week, and left millions of O2 users without calls, text messages or data on their smartphones or 3G tablets. O2 said that around 10% of its 23 million customers were affected for three hours.
An Ericsson spokeswoman told The Guardian: “As a key supplier, we worked closely with our customer to identify any contributing factors and immediately took necessary actions. The fault was fixed on the same afternoon.”
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