The present invention relates to a method for controlling connections that pass through at least one serving gateway of a radio telecommunications network, the method comprising the steps of receiving at a serving gateway support node a first message from an operator requesting that at least some connections be offloaded from a first serving gateway, and responding to the first message by the serving gateway support node relocating at least some of the connections from the first serving gateway to a second serving gateway. Also, a serving gateway comprising circuitry is configured to receive a connection restoration message from a serving gateway support node after the serving gateway has restarted, and respond to the connection restoration message by restoring in memory of the serving gateway at least some connections, which existed before the serving gateway restarted, between user equipment nodes and a packet-based network that passed through the serving gateway.