Despite recent connection problems experienced by subscribers, iBurst says its network can adequately cope with the demands that are being made on it by an increasing number of customers.
As a result of the problems, there was a 20% drop in connection activity in the Johannesburg region and approximately a 5% drop in the Cape Town and Durban regions, the company says.
"We are experiencing massive sales volumes, but we are matching this with a R350 million capital expenditure over the coming year," says Ed Hall, iBurst's head of customer support.
The investment is primarily aimed at easing congestion, he explains.
Hall says iBurst experienced technical problems during the festive season. A lightning strike affected a single base station in the Johannesburg region and traffic was rerouted immediately to the surrounding base stations to cope with the user demand. As a result, some customers experienced a degraded connection over the festive period in that area.
Hall notes that power-related issues also affected the Durban network, with base station outages occurring.
iBurst's Bandwidth Manager Server also failed, affecting international browsing in the Cape Town region and impacting some users who had reached their monthly usage cap, he says.
A fix was applied to resume normal services and bandwidth increased to match demand within 48 hours of the first complaint, he adds.
"Base station outages do unfortunately occur, and typically our repair time is within one hour. Depending on which base station fails, the surrounding base stations are able to pick up the additional load with only a slight degradation of service being felt by customers until the fault is resolved," Hall notes.
"During summer there is generally an increase in base station outages due to lightning damage. However, our network has reached a point where we have redundancy in all significant parts of the network."
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