Telstra to invest $50m to resolve network outage woes

Australian incumbent telco Telstra will be plugging AUS$50 million into its network in a bid to solve outage problems which have plagued it year this.

Having suffered significant outages across its fixed and wireless networks on three separate occasions in recent months, the operator drafted in Cisco, Ericsson and Juniper to conduct a thorough and comprehensive review of its infrastructure last month.  According to COO Kate McKenzie, the operator will focus on adding more capacity to the mobile core, revaluating processes for network element restarts, improving resiliency and increasing its monitoring capabilities.

To that end, McKenzie confirmed Telstra will be investing $50m into its network infrastructure across these specific areas.

“This is an incredibly large and sophisticated network and we can never give a guarantee that disruptions won’t occur from time to time,” she said. “While our focus on the highest levels of reliability will continue to be relentless, we will also focus on being a world leader in the time to recovery when the unexpected happens. In any highly sophisticated world class network like ours there will always be disruptions which is why we use sophisticated tools to help us better detect issues and allow stronger monitoring. We are going to make even further investments in this area to take advantage of some of the most cutting edge technology becoming available.”

The hope, according to Telstra, is that in the event of a disconnection a far greater number of customers will be able to re-register at the same time without knocking users off the network – as was the primary issue during the mobile network outages in recent months – so fewer disruptions to service will occur and any disruption will hopefully be of a shorter duration.