The sole mobile phone network in Ethiopia has suffered its second serious outage within two weeks reports the local Ethiopian Reporter newspaper. The first outage was largely caused by a nationwide power failure, however last Friday’s failure was due to a network expansion project being undertaken by ZTE going wrong.

“Such failure could happen again during the pilot test trials,” Abdurahim Ahmed, ETC’s Corporate Communications Division Manager told The Reporter over the phone late on Friday.

Sources told the newspaper though that the failure was caused by the shut-down of existing base stations without refarming the radio frequencies. “It is simply illogical to switch off existing frequencies without a replacement and run a pilot test for the expansion project,” added the sources. “The simple reason for the failure was that some of the Ericsson stations were switched off temporarily.”

ZTE is currently adding 1.2 million GSM lines to the network capacity to cope with demand and also a surge in usage expected for the upcoming celebration of the Ethiopian millennium. A WCDMA overlay is also planed for some parts of the network.

Source: Cellular News