O2’s CEO Mark Evans would meet with Ericsson’s executives this week to negotiate a compensation package which could reach up to $126 million
U.K. telecom operator O2 could receive compensation of up to £100 million ($125 million) from Swedish vendor Ericsson following a network outage caused by the vendor, which affected O2’s customers in the U.K. last week, U.K. newspaper The Guardian reported.
The software failure meant customers using O2’s mobile network were unable to access mobile data on December 6-7, according to the report.
O2 chief executive Mark Evans was expected to have a meeting with Ericsson executives over the coming days to review what caused the outages and negotiate a compensation.
“Mark Evans will certainly be meeting Ericsson this week for a full review and audit on both sides looking at the Ericsson software and how it was managed. Naturally, included in the conversation will be the subject of damages,” a source with knowledge of the matter told The Guardian.
According to the report, the outage was caused by out-of-date software licenses in Ericsson’s systems. O2 is believed to have been hit because it had recently implemented the latest version of Ericsson’s systems, but some licenses had expired, bringing down parts of the system.
O2’s mobile network is currently used by approximately 30 million people, of which 25 million are direct subscribers and 5 million are customers of MVNOs Tesco Mobile, Sky Mobile, GiffGaff and Lycamobile.
Ericsson said that the company has identified an issue in certain nodes in the core network resulting in network disturbances for a limited number of customers in multiple countries using two specific software versions of the SGSN–MME (Serving GPRS Support Node – Mobility Management Entity).
“The faulty software that has caused these issues is being decommissioned and we apologize not only to our customers but also to their customers. We work hard to ensure that our customers can limit the impact and restore their services as soon as possible,” said Börje Ekholm, President and CEO, Ericsson, in a statement on the outage.
The vendor confirmed that an initial root cause analysis indicates that the main issue was an expired certificate in the software versions installed with these customers. A complete and comprehensive root cause analysis is still in progress, Ericsson said.
