The Verizon outage reveals the end of five-nine network reliability, and it could happen again
The switch to software-based networks might have made the Verizon network less reliable leading to last week's outage.
Exactly one week ago, many Verizon subscribers coast-to-coast suddenly found themselves without service as a huge outage prevented the carrier's customers from making and taking calls, accessing the internet, and connecting to the Verizon network. The outage not only impacted a large number of Verizon accounts, but it also lasted nearly eight hours. After service was restored, Verizon went into "Mea culpa" mode, apologizing profusely and using damage control to keep Verizon subscribers from jumping ship.
Analysts and experts weigh in on the Verizon outage
Verizon promised to issue a $20 credit per account instead of per line, a huge mistake in my opinion since a large customer with one account and eight lines received the sane credit as one guy with one account and two lines. We told you that if you call Verizon and ask for a larger credit, you might get it. We've heard of subscribers being credited as much as $240. Originally, I was credited $20 by Verizon, but when I called to express my displeasure with that amount, I ended up receiving a $60 credit from the wireless provider.
Roger Entner, founder and analyst at Recon Analytics, says that the outage affected 1.5 million Verizon subscribers. On LinkedIn, Entner wrote, "It was likely a minor software update on the 5G standalone core that went wrong in the middle of the day." Many experts on 5G networks say that with today's software based cellular networks, reliability is lower. For example, Sanjoy Paul, who earned his PhD in Electrical and Computer Engineering at Rice University and has helped build 2G, 3G, and 4G networks notes that five-nines reliability is not achievable.
"When you open up your cellphone and you want to connect to the internet through the cellular network, there are about 20 signaling messages that happen even before you get to send the first bit through the wireless network. Out of those 20 messages, if one of them has even a little problem the connection will not happen."
-Sanjoy Paul, PhD
Five-nine reliability means that the network is available 99.999% of the time (hence the five nines). With that kind of reliability, a network would be down 5.26 minutes over the course of a year. Paul states that with carriers moving to a software-based provisioning system the reliability drops to three-nines (99.9%), which results in 8 hours and 30 minutes downtime for the year. "The outage was 10 hours for Verizon, so three-nines was not even met," said Paul.
The five-nines theory of reliability may no longer be valid
Since previous outages relating to the Big 3 U.S. carriers have averaged 10 hours in length, it is quite possible that the five-nines theory no longer applies.
Paul also pointed out that when cellular networks were hardware based, any issue required a change of physical equipment. With the modern 5G Standalone networks, the core is virtualized and cloud-native. Changes can be quickly made by pushing out a software update/patch. However, one line of bad code can end up taking the whole network down. That could be what caused the Verizon outage. If this is what caused the Verizon outage last week, it could occur again.
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