Verizon Blames Recent 4G Outages on ''Growing Pains''

Verizon Wireless is often called "Big Red", and there have certainly been some red faces there this month as this carrier has gone through three 4G outages. A high-level company exec has explained what went wrong.

Mike Haberman, Verizon Wireless VP of network engineering, pointed out that his company was the first large carrier to put an LTE network in place, and therefore is often the first to discover bugs in the systems that run it. "Being the pioneers, we're going to experience some growing pains," said Haberman in an interview with GigaOM.

This carrier offers a number of 4G-enabled smartphones, all of which run Google's Android OS. During the outages, these devices were unable to get 4G data service, and some users were unable to drop down to a slower 3G connection.

Bugs in the System
According to Haberman, all four of the LTE outages this year were caused by problems in the IP Multimedia Subsystem. With the IMS offline, the network was unable to recognize devices that were trying to connect to the 4G network.

The Verizon exec promised that each bug that has caused an outage has been permanently fixed, and none have re-occured. However, the IMS is a huge, complicated system made up of parts made by a number of different companies, and the only way to find bugs is to use the system and fix problems as they crop up.

Haberman said that in order to minimize difficulties for its subscribers, Verizon is going to divide its national 4G LTE network into smaller regional ones. That way, if there's a problem in one area, not every Verizon 4G customer in the U.S. will lose data service.

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