Telstra stumped by third outage

Telstra cannot explain why millions of customers were left stranded without a mobile ­service yesterday.

It was the third major outage in three weeks for Telstra.

Telstra cannot explain why millions of customers were left stranded without a mobile ­service after its 4G services were knocked out of action and its back-up system again failed to handle the impact of a large ­service disruption.

The disruption yesterday left customers unable to use data services and make calls, and prompted NSW police to warn that it could prevent people from reaching emergency services.

Telstra was also unable to say how many customers were affected by the problem.

It was the third major outage in three weeks for Telstra, which charges a premium for its mobile services, and comes as it scrambles to convince investors that it can maintain its position as the market leader.

Telstra’s share price is near an eight-year low, with more than $4 billion wiped off its books over the course of a week. Investors were spooked last week after Telstra told the market its full-year earnings had been further undercut by ­increased competition in the mobile market and the ongoing impact of the National Broadband Network on its earnings. Since taking over as chief executive in May 2015, Andrew Penn has seen more than $45bn scorched under his watch.

Telstra shares, which were about $4.50 this time last year, fell 1.8 per cent yesterday to close at $2.80.

 

Despite the latest setback, Mr Penn stuck with his claim of ­Telstra running the best mobile network in the country. He told The Australian that while recent disruptions were regrettable, they shouldn’t detract from the overall superiority of Telstra’s network over its rivals.

“We have the best network, the most coverage and essentially the fastest network,” he said. “Telco networks do have ­issues all the time. We are absolutely not alone in that regard but we are probably higher profile.”

Mr Penn conceded that, with more people reliant on mobile services, any outage would hurt customers more deeply than ­before. “We will get to the bottom of what happened here,” he said.

Australian Communications Consumer Action Network chief executive Teresa Corbin, who was affected by the disruption, said Telstra was struggling to back up its claims, especially in light of the latest outages. “Telstra markets its brand as having the most reliable network and it does have more coverage, but when it comes to ­reliability there are some big questions around that,” she said.

“Consumers should shop around unless Telstra can reassure its customers that this won’t ­happen again.”

Telstra’s network chief, Mike Wright, could not explain why the 4G layer of Telstra’s mobile network fell over about 10am, forcing the telco to move all of its customers to the 3G network.

The switchover process did not work seamlessly, he added.

“The big shift in traffic caused interruptions in the total amount of data the network could carry and also caused some calls to fail,” he said. “From around midday, we began to isolate some of the elements that were problematic and we have progressively had services restored.”

Mr Wright said most customers affected had problems with their data services. “The impact was more around their ability to transmit data and there were some who couldn’t make voice calls,” he said. “The triple-0 service continued to operate. Of course, if a customer is in a location outside of our coverage or lost their coverage, they could use the ‘emergency calls only’ service on their device.”

Earlier this month, Telstra’s 4G services were down across the country after problems with a planned equipment upgrade in its Exhibition Street exchange in central Melbourne. Apart from the two mobile outages, Telstra had a major disruption to a key interstate cable that left customers unable to make ­triple-0 emergency call services. Telstra, under investigation over the incident, said back-up equipment did not cover an outage believed to have been caused by lightning in central-western NSW.