Mobile network system not immune to individual attack: Telstra

Telstra admits it may be ­impossible to stop an individual bringing down its mobile network following a vast outage.

Tuesday’s outage affected 15 to 20 per cent of mobile customers. Picture: Sam Mooy

Telstra admitted it may be ­impossible to stop an individual bringing down its mobile network following a vast outage on Tuesday as it launched an internal ­investigation into the blackout that disrupted 3G and 4G services accessed by 16.7 million mobile users.

Mike Wright, managing director Telstra networks, said 15 to 20 per cent of mobile customers were affected. “We’re trying to understand exactly what happened minute by minute. We have thousands of elements in the network (and) we make thousands of changes a night, all under control procedures. On this occasion this procedure would have to be looked at very, very carefully to prevent things from being done in the wrong order,” Mr Wright said.

“After any event, no matter how big or how small, we undertake a complete review, minute by minute of what happened.

“We use every possible bit of analysis to understand what is the root cause and if there anything we can do to make the system more robust.

“In a few days we’ll have an ­initial view but it can take weeks if we have to go back in to a laboratory. It really depends on the ­circumstances.”

But Mr Wright said Telstra could not guarantee it could totally safeguard against one individual’s action inflicting so much network damage again. “I think we can get very, very close to that. To sit here and say it’s possible to prevent anything from ever failing in any technology is a difficult question to answer.”

Telstra yesterday clarified ­details into how the outage ­occurred.

“Phones that connect to the mobile network usually are ­assigned to one of 10 nodes, and one of them malfunctioned.

“At any one time we can have three or four of those out of ­service,” he said. “It’s part of the redundancy that they all take the load from each other.”

When the node malfunctioned, “the normal procedure would have been to internally transfer (those calls) first”.

But Mr Wright said this did not happen and as a result, customers’ phones were trying to reconnect to the node, which in turn affected other devices. “If I try to call you and you are one of those 15-20 per cent it feels like my service isn’t working as well.”

Although the network was up and running yesterday there were still connectivity problems. “Wherever you have an event like this there are individual devices that sometimes need to be individually reset; there may still be a handful. But, as far as we’re concerned, from a network perspective it’s over,” Mr Wright said.

He added that customers still facing connectivity woes should contact Telstra. The company was offering free data to customers for 24 hours, from midnight Saturday to midnight Sunday. Foad Fadaghi, managing director of Telsyte, an independent telecommunications strategic planning consultant that specialises in broadband technologies, said he doubted the incident would have any long-term affect for Telstra, although its share price took a battering yesterday.

“Unanimously, analysts believe this is an isolated incident,” Mr Fadaghi said. “As long as it remains an isolated incident, and there’s no repetition of it, it is unlikely to affect Telstra’s status among its customers.”

This was a totally different situation to the problems previously faced by Vodafone.

“In Vodafone’s case it was an ongoing challenge, a poor performance over several years. As long as it does not occur like that for Telstra, it shouldn’t affect their business.

“You’d hope the person ­involved wasn’t a disgruntled employee or disgruntled contractor. One would hope it was a genuine error by someone who had access to the network rather than an ­unauthorised person,” Mr Fadaghi said.

Gartner research director Neil Osmond, a telco specialist, said Telstra would be “deeply embarrassed” by the event but, when compared to other mobile outages around the world, the outage was minor.

He recalled a case in New Zealand where an outage caused half the country to be without mobile connectivity for a week.