Subject: [NEXTEL-1] Cingular GSM network knocked off-line, 900,000 customers affected

From: [email-masked]
Date: Mon, 29 Sep 2003 18:04:34 -0400

Cingular GSM network knocked off-line, 900,000 customers affected
By Paul Roberts
SEPTEMBER 29, 2003

A wireless telephone network maintained by Cingular Wireless was knocked off-line
for much of the weekend, leaving about 900,000 mobile phone customers nationwide
without service.

The outage stretched from the afternoon of Sept. 26 until the morning of Sept. 28,
preventing incoming and outgoing mobile phone service and access to voice mail for
about 4% of Cingular's 22 million customers, according to Cingular spokesman Clay
Owen. The service outage hit customers using Cingular's Global System for Mobile
Communication (GSM) network in the South, Northeast and Midwest regions of the
U.S., Owen said.
The massive network failure was the first widespread outage since Cingular began
building a national GSM voice and data network on top of its older Time Division
Multiple Access (TDMA) network in 2001, Owen said.

Only the newer GSM "overlay" networks were affected. Cingular-owned GSM networks
in California, Nevada, Washington state and the Carolinas that predate the overlay
network use different network infrastructure and were unaffected by the weekend
outage.

Although Cingular couldn't comment on possible causes for the blackout, the
Atlanta-based company is investigating the failure of a home location register
(HLR) in Atlanta, Owen said. HLRs are databases of mobile phone subscribers that
contain account and billing information as well as phone preferences. The HLR
databases are maintained by the cell phone carrier and play a key role in call
switching on GSM as well as TDMA phone networks.

Following the failure of an HLR in Atlanta, Cingular responded by routing call
traffic through a Chicago HLR, Owen said.

Rerouting HLR traffic is a standard procedure in the event of the failure of an
HLR site, Owen said. He declined to comment on whether the traffic routing through
Chicago contributed to the widespread service outage there, but he said that
traffic volume is lower over the weekend, so rerouting traffic from Atlanta
shouldn't have caused problems for Chicago customers.

Despite rumors on the Internet about a computer virus bringing down the HLR,
Cingular had no evidence that computer viruses, worms or hacking played a role in
the outage, Owen said. Customers who were unable to make calls over the weekend
are entitled to credits for the downtime.

Cingular encouraged customers affected by the blackout to contact its customer
support department or walk into one of the company's retail outlets to find out
more about having their accounts credited.  The company's marketing department is
also looking into whether blanket credits should be assigned to customers in
affected areas, but it said it hasn't reached a decision about that.

The standard for mobile communications in Europe, GSM is less common in the U.S.,
where Cingular is in the process of building a separate national GSM network on
top of its TDMA network.

The network is 75% complete and will be 90% complete by the end of the year. In
the meantime, Cingular is slowly migrating customers from its TDMA to its GSM
network, encouraging them to take advantage of features such as camera phones and
other data services that GSM makes popular, Owen said.

http://www.computerworld.com/printthis/2003/0,4814,85502,00.html

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