If you are a ZOL subscriber and have been struggling to access the internet you aren’t alone. For almost a full day the internet service provider experienced a network outage.
The readers who we spoke to who were experiencing challenges were WiMAX subscribers from different parts of Harare with some ZOL Fibroniks customers are also experiencing a loss of service.
According to a statement released by ZOL, the service disruption affected its phone lines and some customer connections with WiMAX users being the most affected group. ZOL has stated that the problem has since been rectified.
On Wednesday 18 February, there was service disruption that affected our phone lines and some customer connections.
The issue, which predominantly affected our WiMAX users, caused IP addresses to be incorrectly mapped, redirecting customers to an error page.
The cause of this issue has now been resolved and customers can now browse normally. If they’re still experiencing problems, we recommend they reboot their router. If the issue persists, please contact our Service team.
While ZOL would not point out the specific cause of the fault, there is a host of possible reasons behind the outage. Complete network disruptions aren’t new especially since the provision of data to the end consumer is dependent on other providers who include sub-sea cable operators and terrestrial fibre operators.
Towards the end of January this year, South Africa experienced a massive internet outage caused by a fault on Seacom’s sub-sea link and a similar loss of service on a West Africa Cable System (WACS) link.
The disruption also affected other Sub-Saharan countries including Zimbabwe which had subscribers to different internet providers experiencing intermittent internet connections during that period.
With some sort of disruption being inevitable at some point, the most prudent thing to do if your business revolves around a constant data connection is to have a backup internet option.
This could be anything from a mobile broadband solution to something as permanent as ADSL. Even an entry level package is enough to keep you on the internet when something like an entire network outage occurs.
Update
ZOL Zimbabwe has since issued another statement regarding the service outage, specifying that only a small percentage of its subscribers were affected. As an apology the ISP has offered all its customers on capped data 10GB of free data. You can read the statement below.
Last week, Wednesday 18 February 2016, ZOL acknowledges the service disruption that affected our phone lines and some customer connections.
Although only a small percentage of ZOL customers were affected, by way of an apology we‘ve credited 10GB of free data to all customers on capped ZOL packages. The data can be used until the end of February.
We have contacted the relevant customers, and our Service team will be on hand to answer any queries.
We thank our customers again for their patience and continued support.
9 comments
im new to zol but so far not seeing the difference with my now expensive adsl
This outage has nothing to do with undersea or internation links.
Before l left Zol, l pointed out that there core routers were struggling to handle network traffic from its Lan into Liquid tel.
Nothing lm sure upto now was done besides increasing the number of users which in turn put more pressure on struggling routers.
The end result is slow internet access and or outages
What data do you have to qualify that the core routers not up to scratch?
I did provide it to your office when l used to be customer! If you have a 70% packet loss at a certain interface on your router plus 1000ms packet delay, its time to look into your pocket.
Who have they credited 10G for loss of service ? I havent seen it.Please verify this kind of info before posting it into a thread.
I have been credited with 10 gig. go to portal.zol.co.zw and look at top up data
Thats the reason i left ZOL for TelOne Adsl, ZOL is internet especialy Wimax is a nightmarish experience, on the other hand TelOne Adsl is superfast, kudos to TelOne which i think it’s the only gvt parastatal left which is doing well. Please ditch ZOL and come and experience real internet adsl and fibre.
+1 Mafirakureva
I left Zol for YoAfrica which only worked for 4 months, they have same calibre of engineers as Zol and Powertel.
I decided to try Telone adsl again. I had line issues but was all impressed how it was handled. Telone totally revamped their customer services and now they are a pleasure to deal with compared to when l left them before.
I bought a wireless router from Telone for 30 bucks, same router Yoafrica tried to charge me 90bucks.
I support u zol is super slow I wish I cld go back to tel one. I miss my torrents.