Another Mobile Outage, page-16

'ywolf' said: "which 3rd world has mobile outages like us?"

Indeed, you might ask, which "3rd world country"...??

Almost fifty years ago now, whilst working for the PMG I was involved in the then Phase 7 project of installing ABC Television Transmitting sites throughout all of the regional and far remote areas of Queensland. The prime RF and TV equipment contractor for the project was NEC and we were working alongside their company's own Engineering staff brought out here on secondment from Japan to do the final commissioning of each site into full operation and on one occasion I can remember asking one of their Engineers what he thought about being temporarily posted out here and working in Australia.

He paused for quite awhile and thought deeply about my question before he answered, and then finally, he said, and I now Quote: "Mmmmm, no problem, we are quite accustomed to working in 3rd world and undeveloped countries." End-Quote.

I remember being quite shocked by his answer to my 'naive' question, because it had never even entered my then young head that Australia could even be thought of in such terms as he had just used to "so diplomatically describe it" but now with the benefit of far older and wiser eyes I realize that to him, as a very well educated and then already very experienced world traveler, suddenly finding himself relocated from Tokyo, to working instead in the remote far Western Queensland of the 1970's, where nearly every "road" on the map was in fact, simply "a graded dirt track" must have truly seemed to him like being literally outposted to the arce-end of the planet.

Skip forward to 1982 and Telstra had by then commenced operation of their DDN (Dedicated Digital Network) which was engineered from the outset to provide its business customers, even back then, with 99.95% reliable continuous availability of service via its use of automated and instantaneous switching of customer's traffic onto geographically diverse alternate path trunking upon the advent of any network failure which affected the primary traffic paths.

Recently repeated mass failures of Telstra's Mobile phone network which has yet again culminated in the failure of public access to the 000 Emergency Services network would seemingly indicate that 37 years later, there has been a very worrying failure of the many years of prior excellence in Telstra's network engineering design standards, and the previously normal subsequent, and very rigorously applied follow on operational network stress-testing to prove reliability and survivability of the network under simulated failure conditions.

With all of the advances made in the past now almost four decades in both technology and equipment hardware reliability, the reality today is that there is now simply no excuse at all, that is in any way acceptable from the company's CEO Andrew Penn, that can be used to "explain away" the failure of public access to such a critically important national Emergency Service as 000.

It seems very obvious, at least to me, that it's now time that our Federal Government's Communications Minister hauled Telstra CEO Andrew Penn in for a "very pointed discussion" indeed, about the absolutely critical nature of our national Telecommunications networks to our nation's everyday functioning, and made absolutely no bones at all, about telling him to spend far less time on "corporate spin and apologizing" for his company's increasingly repeated network failures, and far, far, more time ensuring that they simply don't ever happen, at all, in the first place.

However, with the commercial realities of increasing competition, diminishing market share and relentless pressure to cut costs, I really don't hold out much hope that Mr Penn will the one to actually pull that off.