Verizon suffers second LTE outage this month

Verizon Wireless (NYSE:VZ) said it is working to restore its LTE service to normal levels after being hit with its second major LTE outage this month.

"Verizon Wireless 4G LTE service is returning to normal this morning after company engineers worked to resolve an issue with the 4G network during the early morning hours today," the company said in a statement to FierceWireless. "Throughout this time, 4G LTE customers were able to make voice calls and send and receive text messages. The 3G data network operated normally."

No timeframe was given for when the service will be fully restored, and Verizon did not disclose the cause of the outage.

Early Wednesday morning reports began filtering into Verizon's user forums about a service disruption. The outage appeared to be nationwide, as customers in states stretching from California and Nevada to Michigan, New York, Rhode Island and Virginia were affected. Although Verizon said its EV-DO service was not impacted, some customers with LTE devices also reported disruptions to EV-DO service.

Verizon was hit with an LTE outage that started late on Dec. 6 and stretched into Dec. 7. the company did not disclose the cause of that outage other than saying that it was caused by a "technical issue." A nationwide, 24-hour LTE outage in April was caused by a software bug in Verizon's IP Multimedia Subsystem (IMS) architecture.

Verizon has been the most aggressive U.S. carrier in deploying LTE, and earlier this month trumpeted that its LTE network now covers 200 million POPs.

For more:
- see this Verizon forum
- see this AllThingsD article
- see this The Verge article
- see this CNET article

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