Verizon Explains 4G Outages ... Sort Of

Verizon Wireless is blaming "growing pains" for the three recent outages that left many of its 4G LTE customers without the high-speed wireless service they're paying for.

"Being a pioneer comes with growing pains," Verizon said in a prepared statement. "The recent issues that affected our customers’ 4GLTE service were unforeseen despite careful, diligent planning, deployment and ongoing upgrade programs."

"Nonetheless, we estimate that 4GLTE connectivity has been available approximately 99 percent of the time this year," the statement continued.

Be that as it may, the repeated outages and the delayed, vague explanations are giving Verizon a black eye with at least some of its customers, who are paying a premium for fast, reliable service.

Verizon and other telecoms lose no time texting, calling and emailing when customers fail to pay 100 percent of their bill.  4G customers might reasonably expect the company to notify them when the service they're paying for is unavailable, even if it is only one percent of the time.

99% nothing to brag about

Ninety-nine percent, by the way, is not as great as it sounds.  U.S. airlines are finishing 2011 with only one fatality for every 7.1 million passengers, which is about as close to 100 percent as you can get. A 99 percent record would mean that one of every 100 airline flights crashed.

In its statement, Verizon attributed the problems to multiple, unspecified issues: "Each incident has been different from a technical standpoint. Our engineers have successfully diagnosed those past triggering events, and they have not re-occurred. We also work diligently to rectify technical problems in the Network before they affect any customers."

Whatever the problems might have been, Verizon says it's working to prevent them from happening again.

"We are taking a number of steps, working closely with our network suppliers, to ensure the integrity of our 4GLTE Network. We continue to fortify and improve its performance, and our goal is that our 4GLTE Network meets the same high standards that our 3G Network has set for performance and reliability," the company said.

It's the network

Verizon has spent millions of dollars advertising the supposed superiority of its network, often at the expense of AT&T, which has been struggling with network congestion in major cities for years.

While the latest incidents will most likely not be catastrophic for Verizon, as more serious failures were for rival Blackberry, a ConsumerAffairs.com sentiment analysis of about 4.4 million comments posted on Facebook, Twitter and other social media sites and blogs finds less than negligible dissatisfaction with Verizon's network.

Many companies facing a similar situation would try to nip disaffection in the bud by issuing at least a token refund and a sincere apology to customers, rather than Verizon's boastful and defensive bromide, which includes this rather unseemly bit of chest-thumping:

"The Verizon Wireless 4GLTE Network is BY FAR the largest and the most advanced 4GLTE wireless network in the world. It is available in 190 US markets and covers more than 200 million people, providing the fastest 4G Network in the US."

Well, most of the time, anyway.