Telstra offers free data following mobile network outage

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news Telstra is offering free data for a day for all customers this Sunday following an outage in its national mobile network that affected voice and data services for some customers.

Explaining the situation, Kate McKenzie, Telstra Operations, Chief Operations Officer, said that the firm’s mobile network is set up with a number of “major connection points” (nodes) that manage the flow of voice and data traffic across the mobile network.

The outage yesterday was triggered when one of these nodes experienced a technical fault and was taken offline for repair.

“This normally wouldn’t impact services as we have processes in place to make sure any customers currently connected to a node are transferred to another node before it is taken offline,” she said.

McKenzie conceded that, on this occasion, the “right procedures were not followed”, which resulted in customers being disconnected and heavy congestion on other nodes as customers attempted to reconnect to the network.

As soon as Telstra identified what had occurred, the firm took action to address the fault and restore services to customers “as quickly possible” – prioritising first voice services and subsequently data services.

“First let me say we place the highest priority on the quality of our networks and we’re continually investing to ensure we give our customers the best and most reliable mobile network in the country. That is why we’re incredibly disappointed the outage occurred and deeply sorry for the inconvenience we caused,” McKenzie said.

“While the outage was short in duration, we fully realise the impact it had on our customers, which is why we are offering all of our customers a day of free mobile data this Sunday,” she concluded.

The free data will be allocated to all Telstra mobile customers automatically, the firm said.

Image credit: Telstra

5 COMMENTS

  1. Having experienced (caused) an outage or two in my life, I can remember the sinking, hollow feeling you get when you done something to cause an outage for a client.

    I feel for the tech in this case, that sinking feeling would be breaking terminal velocity right now.

    • Having experienced (caused) outages before also (albeit on a much, much smaller scale) for (much, much smaller) clients, your body turns cold and your vision blurs as you go into panic when you realise what you’ve done. It’s not a fun experience at all.

      Let’s hope steps are taken so future inevitable human errors are mitigated before clients are affected.

  2. It’s a nice PR offer from Telstra that shouldn’t cost them to much. The network is going to be so congested by everybody trying to take advantage of the free data that the download speeds will be exceptionally slow.

    I also agree with the comments above about the tech who caused the problem. I’ve been there with the cold sweats and sinking feeling myself. Hopefully they look after him and just focus on fixing the process and installing a bit more redundancy.

  3. Everyone who works in IT knows that you will eventually break something major, the odds are stacked against you.

    I know the feeling when I thought I had broken something major but had not, this poor person would be feeling the worst right now.

    I am also lucky enough to not have broken something major yet, let’s hope it’s not as large as this one.

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