[LINK] Optus Network Failure

Martin Barry marty at supine.com
Tue Jul 15 19:19:01 AEST 2008


$quoted_author = "Russell Ashdown" ;
> 
> The foundation for todays catastrophic Optus network failure were laid 
> many years ago when politicians decided to privatise the Telstra cabling 
> network and leave it in the hands of a newly privatised Telstra.

Inter-city capacity was one of the first areas where competing telcos could
justify deploying their own infrastructure. It hasn't been a monopoly for
more than a decade, probably closer to two.

The only area that is still an issue in this regard is the Tasmania-mainland
link.
 
 
> This one policy decision delivered to Telstra a stranglehold on 
> Australia's communications networks; not simply their own, but the 
> networks of all other "competing" carriers.  Further, the network that 
> was given as a gift from the politicians to Telstra had, over many 
> decades been hardened and made incredibly redundant at public expense.

Telstra's network is no more resistant to hardware failures and backhoes
than anybody else's.


> The policy decision, instead of facilitating the growth and 
> modernisation of the existing network, has caused "competing" carriers 
> to cobble together their own (minimalist) backbone networks in an effort 
> to protect their businesses from unexpected outage as well as Telstra's 
> avarice.

I'd hardly call the amount of inter-city capacity that has been deployed as
minimalist. There are quite a number of competing telcos and anyone can
purchase capacity on different paths to the level of redundancy they
require.


> Todays outage, while caused primarily by a digger digging up a cable, 
> was further compounded when Optus's only other (redundant) link failed 
> when attempts were made to put it into service.

So the non-urgent replacement of a failed component on the inland path
suddenly became super-mega-urgent to the point of a helicopter being used to
ferry the part.

There's a bloke called Murphy and occasionally he visits.

 
> As today's experience demonstrates, the redundancy of Australia's 
> communications systems is far too important an issue for our businesses 
> and the public for politicians to allow this situation to continue. 

So leave the market to sort it out. Plenty of people waded in to offer
emergency capacity to those caught out by the Optus incident.


> While the infrastructure horse may have well and truly left the stable 
> and bolted, I call upon the government to enact legislation that will 
> make it an obligation for all carriers to provide hot backup network 
> facilities for their competitors to use at no charge.

What a waste of time and money that would be.


Now if you want to talk about removing the monopolistic behavior of Telstra
in relation to their exchanges and the "last mile", that's a different
discussion...

cheers
Marty



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