[LINK] Optus Outage Origins (OOO, nasty)

[David]

On 13/11/2023 20:58, Roger Clarke wrote:
>> [Tom]  For government, business, and domestic users of internet and phone services there are some clear lessons from the Optus outage. Don't have all your phones and Internet provided by the one company. If you are providing safety critical services, have connections to multiple networks.
> Two-SIM handhelds?  Rolling, cheap, year-long contracts with someone you can switch to if/when needed?  But watch out for unexpected pointc-of-failure / dependencies, non-scalability (Vodefone cope with large-scale and quick switching from a Telstra meltdown??), and the takeover game.
Let me begin by making clear I'm no apologist for corporate sacrifice of the general good in their pursuit of obscene profits and executive lifestyle.  I completely agree with Tom re Optus, and I nominate Snowy-2 as being another all-our-eggs-in-one-basket example of a badly misconceived concept; these things are far more reliable when risk is distributed.

However the public outcry over the Optus outage seems a little one-sided IMHO.  Accidents do happen and no carrier can guarantee network access 100% of the time, so I'd argue that any SME who relies on network access (e.g. for EFTPOS) has some responsibility to foresee the possibility of extended outages.  When an NBN kerbside cabinet was demolished locally by some young men allegedly trying to see how fast they could get around a roundabout (!) services were out for over a week.

Many NBN-approved modems support automatic fallback to a mobile dongle or other interface.  It's probably worth the cost for a viable business anyway, but the Federal Government could help by requiring all carriers to offer a low-cost fallback service to customers of other carriers, and preferably by a different transmission technology.

_David Lochrin_