Following its third outage in two months, Telstra customers want answers

TELSTRA has explained today’s network outage, the third in two months. Here are some useful theories on what’s going on.

a man trying to pick up the signal on his mobile phone

WITH Telstra suffering its third network outage in two months, customers are calling for answers.

While it may have been willing to accept ‘human error’ as the cause of the first incident, with two subsequent outages it appears there is a larger problem at play.

Today’s problem, according to a Telstra statement, was caused by a “card failure in a media gateway in Victoria”. Telstra said the issue affected less than 3 per cent of mobile customers — those customers experienced problems making calls at various times during the outage.

Telstra has said it will conduct a major review of the three outages.

Independent telecommunications analyst Paul Budde said all indications show there is something fundamentally wrong in Telstra system.

“Most of the time it’s a software issue, which causes a program to not do what it is supposed to,” he told news.com.au

Mr Budde said problems ingrained with the software are often hard to pinpoint, which could explain repeat outages.

“Experts have to analyse the total network from scratch and have to analyse every software program to find the one that is causing the problem. This can be a lengthy process,” he said.

He added the problem could be solved quickly, but he didn’t expect this to be the case.

“If you are lucky or know what you are looking for, you might be able to find the issue in the first couple of days, but it can take a week or longer,” he said.

The telecommunications analyst said the recurrence of the issue also proves Telstra’s initial explanation of human error was not accurate.

“I find that hard to understand because a system can’t have human error without messages coming up and asking if ‘you really want to do that’,” he said.

“That already seemed a bit strange and now additional problems indicate something more than human error.”

Mr Budde said the problem was likely different to the network capacity errors which have plagued Vodafone in recent years.

“The problem with Vodafone was there was not enough network to handle the enormous traffic using the service,” he said.

“However, given Telstra has offered its customers data free days to make up for the outages means the issue has nothing to do with network capacity.”

The internet is a freeway of sorts. Picture: EFTM.

Another concept being floated as the cause of the outages is a problem with the underwater internet cable connecting Australia to the rest of the world.

Following last Thursday’s outage, technology journalist Trevor Long explained the issue using an analogy of a 100-lane freeway from Sydney to Los Angeles.

“Whenever you request data from overseas, be it to read a tweet, view a website or watch a TV stream — that requires cars to be sent flying along that freeway to get the info and then flying back to show it to you,” he wrote.

“As people started to experience issues last week, Telstra could see from their network status that those cars were getting banked up at each end — there was a problem on the freeway somewhere.

“The good news is, there are many hundreds more lanes available — it’s just that Telstra doesn’t have the right to send traffic onto those lanes”

“But they can pick-up the phone to the owner of the roadway and get clearance to do so, perhaps even buy more lanes.

“It seems that on Thursday evening as they started to put up signs around the roads directing traffic onto the new lanes they basically sent people around and around in circles. This means huge traffic issues — which caused 50 per cent of people’s services to stop working and took hours to get right.”

Telstra is holding its cards close to its chest, refusing to pinpoint the exact issue causing the network outages.

Instead, the telco has published a tweet simply stating today’s issues “had been resolved”.

Following the outage last week, Telstra chief executive Andrew Penn was forced to issue a grovelling apology, in which he accepted full responsibility for the problem and offered customers another data ‘free’ day on April 3.

While services were restored within four hours, some customers complained of ongoing problems into the next day, while others complained of poor internet speeds, broken landlines and failure to access various websites.

It followed a huge outage in February, that Telstra blamed on an “embarrassing” error made by a worker.

At the time IT operations consultant Sam Newman of ThoughtWorks, told news.com.au it was surprising that Telstra chief operatons officer Kate McKenzie would blame one person for the outage.

“It’s about the system you create, it’s not about individuals,” he said.