Red-faced Telstra on alert for one day data apology

The telco is offering the free data as an apology to its customers after a serious outage in its network earlier this week.

The new Samsung Galaxy S5 is displayed at the Mobile World Congress, the world's largest mobile phone trade show in Barcelona, Spain, Tuesday, Feb. 25, 2014. Expected highlights include major product launches from Samsung and other phone makers, along with a keynote address by Facebook founder and chief executive Mark Zuckerberg. (AP Photo/Manu Fernandez) Picture: Ap

Telstra technical teams are on a war footing to ensure that the telco’s mobile network can bear the demand of users looking to make the most of free data on offer tomorrow.

The telco is offering the free data as an apology to its customers after a serious outage in its network earlier this week knocked 10 to 15 per cent of its customers out of action.

With Telstra pinpointing human error as the culprit, networks managing director Mike Wright said special measures had been taken to ensure the mobile network stays intact.

“We will have extra teams on hand and I would like to think of it as a special version of business as usual,” Mr Wright said.

He added that the company had carried out extensive modelling of the data appetite of its users to factor in a number of scenarios.

“We expect a number of people to use their mobile services as normal, but there are some people who are likely to use data aggressively,” he said.

Mobile customers will not need to sign on or activate any special offers to gain access to the data and one user, Nermin from Sydney, said he planned to use the unmetered data to download computer games he hadn’t yet got around to loading.

“I’ve been meaning to download quite a number of games that I’ve purchased over the years and haven’t got on my new PC yet,” he said, adding the files would clock in at about 200GB in total. Other users said they would binge-watch Netflix all day or backup all their personal data to the cloud.

Another user who preferred to remain anonymous told The Weekend Australian that they would “use a VPN to torrent as many movies as possible”, and another said they would go the legal route and binge-watch Netflix all day.

Mr Wright said any pockets of heavy data usage were likely to be balanced out on the overall network, which had been steadily reinforced over time.

The free data offer is also likely to be welcomed by users who are not directly signed on with Telstra but use its network.

Mobile virtual network operator Boost, which uses Telstra’s mobile network, advised users in a Facebook post that, “You can just go as crazy as you want on Sunday and you will have endless data!”

The network outage is unlikely to have a long-term impact on Telstra’s primacy in the market and while it has been an embarrassing episode for the telco, Mr Wright said that the reach and quality of Telstra remained unparalleled.

“We are confident that the network will be able to handle the (free data) initiative on Sunday,” Mr Wright said. “We are already delivering a great service and across the ­network we will be able to keep that up.”