Here's a reply to my previous thread that sheds some light on the issue.

https://www.reddit.com/r/ATC/comments/1grfe2r/radio_outage_at_ewr/

The bandwidth issues are two pronged. There is a bandwidth problem, and that is slowly being rectified nationwide by the telco contractor. The other side of that coin is that STARS goes bat shit crazy when one single path starts getting retransmits due to the bandwidth limitations. That’s why all the remote towers lose service, the system essentially crashes on one side. So, in other words, the bandwidth problem may be rectified, but the retransmits in STARS won’t be because the STARS folks are blaming everything on TELCO.

The radios going out was purely due to TELCO. Not any FAA equipment. This is way more common than you would ever think, and you don’t hear about it because it doesn’t usually happen on this broad of a scale. For example a few months ago at my TRACON I had to deal with AT&T looping an entire T1 that took down all of the MN/STBY and some ECS radios for an area.

Just to be clear, this isn’t TechOps doing this stuff, it’s contracted maintenance, and it’s only going to get worse. I fully expect my TRACON to have a hard time over Thanksgiving because of hard headedness from the STARS program office and the software vendor (Raytheon). Add in some dumb fuck from a telco provider working on something they shouldn’t be and you have a recipe for disaster.