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Vodacom claims sabotage to its network

Johannesburg - Vodacom Group [JSE:VOD] CEO Pieter Uys on Friday claimed that the mobile operator had been a victim of sabotage on its fibre networks.

In an interview with regional radio station Jacaranda 94.2, Uys said that at least one of the recent outages to hit the group was caused by sabotage.

On Thursday Vodacom's network went down for a large portion of the working day as a result of multiple failures of transmission equipment. This meant that subscribers were unable to  make calls or send text messages.

Uys told DJ Darren Scott:" Yesterday was not a great time for me, we worked through it and we know what is wrong and what we have to do to make it better going forward."

Uys compared the network failure to a hosepipe being severed in two or three pieces with water unable to go through.

"So we fixed that pretty quickly, but because so many subscribers are connected to those elements of the network, they all start calling, and it puts more load on the network and it's a snowball (effect). We had a similar situation six years ago," he said.

Uys denied that recent failures were as a result of Vodacom's network being overloaded.

"But the network should be able to cope with it. One of them at least was also sabotaged because we could see the holes were dug in two places exactly in the right spot, cut just our cable off (sic). But we should be able to work around it." 

Elaborating on potential acts of sabotage, Uys said: "So what happens is these fibre networks are normally put underground and what was so odd in this situation in the middle of the bush, far out of anywhere, someone had dug a hole, a smallish hole right above the cable, and he didn't take the cable, he just cut it off. The same thing happened in another place."

"We (are) definitely investigating," he said. Thursday's outage was related to failures in two places, which should not have caused the network to "fall over", he added. 

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