Telstra commits $38m to address mobile outages

Australia’s largest operator Telstra has committed A$50 million ($38.3 million) towards improving its network resiliency following a spate of outages, but coverage of its announcement was tainted by another minor outage.

At an investor presentation in Melbourne, Telstra COO Kate McKenzie revealed that the operator has completed a review into the recent mobile network disruptions.

The review identified a range of steps to reduce the likelihood of another outage, including increasing redundancy, adding more capacity to the core network, introducing new procedures for key network element restarts and improving resilience in international connectivity.

In response, Telstra will spend around A$25 million installing real time traffic monitoring and customer impact monitoring equipment.

The remaining A$25 million will be spent increasing the network’s capacity to handle a large number of re-registrations occurring simultaneously after a disruption.

“What this means is that in the event of a disconnection, a much larger number of customers will be able to re-register at the same time so any disruption to services will be of a much shorter duration,” she said.

The review was conducted by Telstra’s specialist teams, experts from Ericsson, Juniper and Cisco, and independent advisor Dave Williams from Tech Mahindra. It follows a series of mobile network outages in a short period with various causes.

Unfortunately for Telstra, local media coverage of Telstra’s investment announcement has concentrated on the fact that hundreds of Telstra customers were reporting outages affecting mainly internet access just hours after the announcement was made.

According to the company, the outage affected ADSL broadband in Queensland, lasted less that half an hour and was unconnected to the recent mobile network outages, but this did not stop subscribers from commenting about the irony on social media.