Israel's Cellcom network suffering major fault

TEL AVIV, ISRAEL: Cellcom, Israel's mobile phone operator, said on Wednesday it was having problems with its network that was preventing many of its customers from making or receiving calls.

"Cellcom's network is experiencing possibly its worst-ever malfunction since the establishment of the company. A very significant number of customers are experiencing great difficulty in making and receiving calls," chief executive Amos Shapira told a news conference.

Cellcom had 3.376 million customers at the end of September.

Shapira said the company's engineers were working together with engineers from Nokia to try to fix the problem and restore service as soon as possible, although he could not say how long this might take.

"Hundreds of Cellcom engineers are doing everything they can to restore this vital service as quickly as possible. We are in touch with Nokia engineers  in Finland and anywhere else we can recruit knowledge to fix this fault as quickly as possible," he added.

Shapira said the malfunction was "in software in the core of the network."

A telecoms source said clients across Israel were affected but that those hardest hit were residents of the centre of the country where 80 per cent of the population lives.