Zamtel offers free calling after suffering major service outage
Zamtel has announced that it will allow its customers to make free Zamtel to Zamtel calls from today Saturday, 30th June 2018 from 22:00 hours to tomorrow Sunday, 1st July 2018 at 12:00 hours.
This was after the company suffered a major service outage at about 02:30 hours yesterday which disrupted its mobile voice and mobile data services countrywide.
Zamtel Chief Executive Officer Sydney Mupeta announced in a statement that the outage was caused by a power surge that affected Zamtel’s central equipment site located at Lamya House in Lusaka.
“The power problem was resolved within two hours after the failure, however, the surge had caused serious damage to critical equipment including our Home Location Register (HLR) that hosts customer information. As a result of this, our customers were unable to make calls and use mobile internet,” Mr Mupeta said.
He said the restoration of the damaged equipment required rebuilding the entire HLR system, a process which is meticulous and time consuming adding this resulted in the prolonged outage that was experienced.
“To avoid reoccurrence, Zamtel is accelerating the implementation of the second HLR system at a new geographical site within Lusaka to provide backup to the current system. The backup HLR system which was scheduled to be commissioned in August 2018 as part of the GRZ Communication Towers Project has now been brought forward to mid July 2018,” Mr Mupeta stated.
“We sincerely apologise to all our esteemed customers for the inconvenience caused during this unfortunate outage. As a demonstration of how much we value our customers’ support, we will allow our customers to make free Zamtel-to-Zamtel calls from 22:00 hours on Saturday, June 30th 2018 to 12:00 hours on Sunday, July 1st 2018.”
Mr Mupeta assured Zamtel customers that the company is committed to the provision of quality services adding that the ongoing network expansion and modernization project, as part of the US$ 280million investment, will reposition Zamtel as the prime driver of the country’s digital transformation journey.
Source: Zamtel
