Vodafone suffers NSW, WA, Qld outages

Vodafone customers in some states have been having trouble with voice and data services, according to the company.

Since just after 7am this morning, degraded service and problems accessing 3G data had been plaguing some customers in NSW and Western Australia, the telco's network status page said.

It also issued an alert for the Bundaberg and Fraser coast regions of Queensland, where it said that customers might have had trouble accessing 2G and 3G services.

The Queensland and WA outages had been resolved, but the NSW issues were still current. Engineers are working to resolve the issue, according to Vodafone.

The company was also battling with an outage that saw customers having trouble using the customer care line.

Vodafone is currently in the midst of a massive network overhaul with Chinese network vendor Huawei. The telco is working to replace the ageing Ericsson 2G and 3G radio equipment in 8000 sites with Huawei gear that will enable Vodafone to begin rolling out LTE when it is ready. The network upgrade followed months of issues for Vodafone customers, with many unable to make calls or send or receive data over its network.

Vodafone later said that it had restored full 3G data connectivity for customers in NSW, WA and parts of Victoria at approximately 3pm AEST. The problems had been caused by a software issue that had been intermittently affecting some customers' ability to establish data connections on their smartphones and mobile broadband devices. Once connected data operated normally, the telcos said.

Updated at 5:13pm, 16 September 2011: added comment from Vodafone.