Software failure downs Telstra ADSL

Tony in Melbourne, you're right, we are a technological society and rely on the internet quite a lot these days. We rely on it for news, entertainment, and communication. For a lot of us it's our link to the world and what is happening around us.

Because we are so reliant on it, Telstra (our country's largest telco) should build REDUNDANCY into its networks. Sure there are always going to be problems, but over two days of downtime is ridiculous. If a fibre optic cable was cut, that's understandable, but a SOFTWARE problem causing two days downtime? Do Telstra have chimps manning their computers?

Peter of Perth: Unfortunately Telstra wholesales their DSL services and bandwidth to other ISP's - so in areas where Telstra has the only infrastructure, any down time with their equipment will affect all other wholesale providers. I can confirm however that several ADSL providers from aaNet, iiNet, Netspace, Westnet and of course Telstra are still not 100% functional up here in the Alice and these are just the services im aware of. What I dont understand is why it is taking such an exuberant amount of time to sort this. Its now Sunday evening, and didn't all this start almost a week ago??

I have to say that the 1,000 customers that Telstra reports does not mention that that also includes wholesale customers like Internode for instance. We had no service for over 3 days and all our phones only recently changed to voip. Now we crawl back to the perpetrator for a life-line land line.

I'm with Westnet and have been off-line since Monday. I'd love to know what the cause of this is. It's so widespread with so many exchanges effected it's not your average fault. Smells like a firmware upgrade gone wrong or similar. With only the smallest amount of bitchiness is nice to know Telstra's retail customers are effected as well as their wholesale

I don't disagree with you Ab of Perth - we do need to take outages as part and parcel with modern technology and have some understanding and patience. Having said that (and like many others here as well) the fact comes back to the turnaround time to restore services as well as the level of information supplied to the customers over the cause & resolution. Again, many others here agree that Optus were more up front and honest about their 2 issues than what Telstra have seemingly been over this ADSL issue. It's interesting isn't it, that even when there is trouble at the Telstra camp, Tony can still find means to point the finger at Optus. Which I wouldn't mind, except he was overtly vocal at pointing out how bad Optus was when the shoe was on the other foot... Consistency?

@Tony of Melbourne, the reason we are all pointing out the hypocrisy of Telstra is that they (you) said that the Optus outage was something that customers should not have to experience. But Optus was truthful about their problem, while we have yet to hear from Telstra either the true extent or cause of the Telstra problems. "People who live in glass houses shouldn't throw stones" needs to be put in front of all the Telstra hype merchants.

@Tony of Melbourne, the reason we are all pointing out the hypocrisy of Telstra is that they (you) said that the Optus outage was something that customers should not have to experience. But Optus was truthful about their problem, while we have yet to hear from Telstra either the true extent or cause of the Telstra problems. "People who live in glass houses shouldn't throw stones" needs to be put in front of all the Telstra hype merchants.

For once I have to agree with Tony of Melbourne even though I disagreed with him strongly in the past and suspect he is really a Telstra employee. Even if he is a Telstra employee he is right in that people are over-reacting to an extent. We do have to accept some of these failures as part of life, just look at Optus' recent problems. All we can do is ask (demand) that these companies learn from these problems and mistakes and try to do better. Though in many respects Telstra only has itself to blame for the negativity and mistrust aimed at it though it's past lies and deceptions. Telstra have always played dirty and always stooped to blame others and throw mud about. But instead if they rose above this and just told the truth and didn't try to pass the buck or stoop to comparing and insulting the competition might find they are more respected.

Hmm! Amazing how the Telstra bashers come out of the woodwork when there is a Telstra problem rather than accepting that every system be it a hot water system or electrical system or any other there will always be failure's due to such things as software this is part and parcel of out hi tech cities and suburbs. When there is a power cut do you all run around like headless chickens bagging the electricity company? Accept this is modern day life, get real people if we never tried to better our lives we would still be ploughing the fields with cattle.

Hey Kevin of Chicago, what a typically arrogant american comment to say optus is just ex Telstra employees and will never be any different.

The company was started by Cable & Wireless and BellSouth, which as you would well know is a US company. They bought competition to a country that needed it. When you talk about the companies in the US who have real competition it has taken them well over the 18 years that Optus has been going to develop into what they are now. In fact the growth of these companies has come about due to acquisition and consolidation, not competition.

Here in Australia our population is spread out over many thousands of kilometres, not bunched up, so building networks is expensive. I agree that some of the decisions by Optus have not been good, the HFC cable is one of them but Telstra have had over 100 years of public money to build the network and want more public money to ruin competition because a couple of yanks say this is what happens in the rest of the world and that only one carrier can give true competition.

All Sol has tried to do since he got here was re-establish a monopoly so he can get paid more (he just received a pay rise) and run away back to the states with our cash.

I did work for Optus in the late 90's and enjoyed it, they were doing things that Telstra could only dream about, I now consult and look at all carriers and providers and sometimes the smaller ones beat both the big ones, but the risk is high when you consider what has happened in the past (One Tel, Worldexchange etc). Overall we have the seeds of a very good future as long as the government does not give in to Telstra and allows true competition. BTW they just announced a profit of $4.8 Billion dollars so they are not crying poor.

Alice Springs can be added to the list of problem spots. ADSL has been operating intermittently for the past few days and is still giving trouble. Some connections have been down since this all started on the 12th. Im sure Alice Springs is right down the bottom of the fix list too due to the fact we have such a small subscriber base compared to other towns / suburbs.

Dale of Adelaide, why shouldn't Optus point out that their outage was caused by 3rd-party contractors cutting their redundant cable path whilst the primary cable path was already having an issue? It's the truth. There's no shame in that, and I for one applaud them for their honesty and I feel for them as it's an unfortunate series of events. Note also that Telstra don't do triple-redundancy either - they only ever have two paths to a given state. It could just as easily have been Telstra.

Dale of somewhere: You have no idea on what you speak about.

The number of network faults on telstra's end that they know about and plan to fix in the near future BUT outright knowingly and deliberately lie to wholesale customers about by denying there is any issue at all thereby wasting wholesale customers time by having their techs and engineers spend hours and hours trying to fault find what they already know is not their problem but telstra's. It happens so often, you could write a decent sized novel every year.

And with regards to Optus Dale, yes you're right, how remiss of them to blame a contractor who rips up a cable meters from a signed warning doing work that is not contracted by or has anything to do with Optus or a related operation *sigh*.

How about you all switch to iiNet. Stop complaining about the services that your getting and actually do something about it.

If you think your complaints are going to get something done, then why hasn't this worked? It's like every forum i see on the net is Telstra this, Optus that! The only way to get their attention is to give em a call tell them that your switching ISP's. I made the best decision in switching from Telstra to iiNet considering the rise in alcahol prices, it doesn't bother me at all.

Telstra will always be slow to fix any ADSL problems because they prefer to sell more expensive fixed line data services. It is not in their interest to fix ADSL problems quickly, otherwise it would be seen as a reliable service for business use.

This is why they were so slow to introduce ADSL2 because of the potential for their customers to switch from the higher cost services. We really need some decent competition in Australia for Telstra. They are totally focused on maintaining their monopoly and maximizing their margins.

Optus are basically just a bunch of ex-Telstra employees with exactly the same mentality. Here in USA there are several telco's that are the size of Telstra and they are very competitive. We need to encourage more of these companies into Australia and then we would see the cost go down, services expand and reliability improve.

Dale of Adelaide, mate, you are obviously a Telstra employee, and sadly misinformed at that. If you think having an outage for days is ok and put down the competition who moved heaven and earth to get their customers up and running in hours is not, you give me more reasons to change carriers!

Unbelievable how easy it is for Mr.Taylor to point the finger @ Optus. I don't think Optus caused the Telstra cards to failure, why would Mr.Taylor even mention Optus in this article? I heard It's way over 2500 customers have been impacted. Could be more. Easy for Telstra to lie anyway as usual.

He wants to take the heat off Telstra's failure by pointing the finger at what happened to Optus...a pretty low act, considering Optus got its customers back up and running in hours, not DAYS! If this is the level of service from Telstra, I might switch to Optus!

There is something wrong with this story. Most of the places named aren't even on the gold coast or even in Queensland. Initially the report says Software Fault. The third last paragraph contains a quote from Telstra indicating that line cards are being replaced. Line cards are hardware, not software. Which is it? Clearly, something more sinister is going on here, especially given the stab at Optus.

Well its now Friday 15 ... my internet went down on Mon 11 ... still not working .. & my suburb is not on their list ... I think the "1000" is way under the mark ...

At least Telstra are transparent in regards to faults and outages on the Bigpond network. As for Singtel Optus, they prefer to blame other parties for their failures, which on a much larger scale impacted on many QLD users. Telstra are prepared to cop the blame if necessary, whereas Optus prefer to blame other parties. Optus are a joke for a number 2 player in the telco space.

Thanks to the "world class management" of Telstra we have another Telstra outage. If we were able to add together all of the outages of all Telstra customers over the past month, I'm sure that it would make Optus' 6 hours of outage one day and the other couple of hours the following days minuscule.

I find it amusing that Optus was having software difficulties recently, and now Telstra are also having "software" issues.

Laughable that Telstra can say its "competitors" have regular failures, when 90% of the failures of their competitors would actually occur in Telstra managed equipment.

No service can have 100% uptime, but there's no need to put down your competitors because of their occasional failures.

Was this the same mr from Telstra who mentioned that outage can be prevented by having redundancy and backup hardware in place ? Oh, what, that would only go for Optus.

It's interesting the contrast between Optus, who have been quite open and honest about the cause of their fault as well as the steps taken to address it and their commitment to fixing it, and Telstra, who instead resort blatantly attempt to shift attention to another carrier.

Mr Taylor (to no surprise on my part) refers to the Optus outage as "regular", which it most certainly is not, and from the sheer scale of the number of affected sites, the affected customer count cannot possibly be only 1000. Go understatement.

Why haven't Telstra swapped out all affected cards within a few hours of the initial impact, or simply rolled back to known good software? Clearly they aren't being transparent at all, and acting like a spoilt brat caught out misbehaving to boot.

I really dont see it as any great problem....Telstra Broadband is so slow anyway, you wouldnt notice the differance!

All the Telecommunications in Australia, they used the same equipment, without double segurity, and fibre optic systems, all don't have any optic ring. Example now for our Government, the Broadband must obsolutely different to the Telecommunications we used now.

Interesting... So... Telstra Wholesale reserve dedicated dslam cards for big pond customers, so this means that if an exchange is out of ports, customers can sign up to big pond and get approved , apply with ISPx and get rejected, how very interesting this is. More of a reason for full structural separation of tesltra.

Optus will work to fix an issue in hours? Telstra will take days. But thats ok its only a thousand customers that cant do any business for 2 days

I don't think Telstra are pointing the finger at Optus, rather they're saying that it's nothing compared to the network problems Optus is experiencing. Either way, it must be nice for the spotlight to be off Optus for once!

MMmmm it appears Telstra too has its own outage problems. "The MOLE" has a very good point.....will this 13/1300/1800 outage within the Telstra network that affected all calls made from telstra services to any 13/1300 or 1800 service regardless of carrier get some attention?

I don't really care whose fault this is - is my internet working yet?! I find it hard to believe that this is still going on over two days later. If it isn't working - can someone PLEASE give me a realistic expectation as to when I may expect this to be rectified?

Heh shoes on the other foot for Telstra reap what they can sow.

I think this may be a much bigger issue than reported. It is interesting that my account with Westnet has been off line for the same period of time.

Hopefully it will get reported, but all 13, 1300 & 1800 numbers nation wide, are/were unreachable today. Like to see Telstra blame Optus for that.

Nice of Telstra to point the finger at Optus, as if in some way this makes it all OK. Surely a small number of cards could be swapped out in minutes, not days? Are you telling the truth Mr.Taylor?