It was just under two weeks ago that we were talking about Liquid having an outage. Then, we were told the outage was as a result of a fibre break. The outage did not lead to people being cut off completely, but rather getting slow speeds,
Well, it’s just happened again. Right now Liquid’s service has degraded. They have given the notice to say,
Important Notice: Service Degradation
Please note that we are currently experiencing degraded speeds on our network resulting in intermittent connectivity and in some cases, loss of service. Our engineers are working to resolve this in the shortest time possible. We apologise for any inconvenience caused. Kindly bear with us
Start time: 22/02/2023 12:02hrs
Resolution time: TBA
From Liquid
We asked which areas were affected and got the following reply,
Our sincere apologies, kindly note we are currently experiencing service degradation affecting all our internet customers due to an upstream fibre break.
We talked about what goes on when there are fibre breaks, why does it happen in the first place and such other matters here: Liquid was facing an internet outage earlier this morning. Why was it just slow and not completely off?
These service disruptions are getting out of hand. A few days ago, Econet had its own outages which they blamed on core network degradation. It appears the Econet group has a lot to work on. In the words of Mario Balotelli ‘why always them?’
We have ranted about these kinds of service disruptions but they seem to be happening with much more frequency. What gives? The operators point to a shortage of foreign currency prohibiting them from carrying out routine maintenance and/or upgrading their systems to cope with increasing demand.
There’s truth to that but at this point we are tired of the same old excuses. Of course, fibre breaks are different from core network degradations. Liquid has little control over fibre breaks happening except to improve their redundancy. But still.
What do you think about all this? Do let us know what you think in the comments section below.
Also read:
Should we give Econet, NetOne and Telecel a pass for shoddy service? Maybe
Your router’s okay, it’s Liquid Home (ZOL)’s network that’s down: a rant on service disruptions
7 comments
There is so because of lack of competition in Zimbabwe that is why some players become so big and end up getting away with poor service delivery. The regulator seems compromised and the laws that say that ingenious ownership should be more than 60% should be done away with because no indigenous players are coming to the fore to create new companies that can compete with the Econet group. If POTRAZ was clean enough to be doing its job we wouldn’t be here. It’s a shame that Econet is the only player paying license fees. as for NetOne and Telecel ? I would need convincing that those 2 players pay those hefty fees to POTRAZ.
At this point no one can deny that we need more competition in this space. Granted, no one is clambering to compete in Zimbabwe, what with the prevailing economic conditions. But still, we need proper competition and I suspect these outages will only happen once every few years in such an environment.
Technicains are leaving for greener pastures, network administrators are in high demand overseas
Had not considered that. They are likely losing good engineers every other month to foreign companies.
Zvakubhowa. Every week it’s always something. I know it’s not their fault sometimes because we have vandals in the country but damn bro, they have to step up
True. We can only understand up to a point. The frequency of these outages is just too much now.
ZESA outages , rains , water clogging the drainage trenches with optic links.
days ago I was in CBD and the underground cable was being attended by Telone team outside ZOL offices in Bulawayo.
Also with erratic power outages bases stations have limited power to run them . 12 hours runnng on diesel on a tower aint a joke. Spares are sourced in hard currency and most ZOL users buy data in RTGS. So …..