Erikson demands $17m to fix Econet's servers?

By Staff Writer | 18 Mar 2019 at 09:57hrs
Econet
A few weeks ago Econet Zimbabwe's network went down and most subscribers with the country's largest service provider could not make or receive calls or do anything really. POTRAZ came out and blamed such outages to foreign currency shortages, while blamed a core system failure somewhere in Masvingo that ultimately toppled everything down.

Kukurigo, which claims to be Zimbabwe's leading WhatsApp news service claims to have exclusive information obtained from anonymous Econet insiders.

Kukurigo said that Erickson who installed Econet's Home Location Register, a computer system responsible for authenticating legitimate subscriber connections on the network and the services available to them, wants a payment of $17 million before they can come and fix and service the servers. If the remaining computer fails, they further claim, the entire Econet network will fail.

It's not clear whether this explanation is the actual truth.

Sources inside Econet said the critical computer system housed at Pockets Hill, Highlands failed early March forcing engineers to direct its entire network load to the second server housed in Harare's Willovale industrial area.

The technical patchwork is said to be responsible for recent peak hour network outages.

"The network relies on two Home Location Register servers to balance the network load and also for the purposes of redundancy, we cannot run a network on one server because the load is too heavy which is why you have seen the network failing around 1900hrs which is our peak traffic hour," said an Econet source who spoke on condition of anonymity as they are not authorised to speak to the Press.

The Home Location Register is a computer system responsible for authenticating legitimate subscriber connections on the network and the services available to them.

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