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The thoughts, opinions, happenings, and just plain ramblings of a seemingly boring person.

Eventful Start to the Working Week

After having a generally quiet and normal working week last week, this one has started off with a bang.

Monday saw me driving down to the Gold Coast to replace a faulty computer in our small office down there. I didn't mind the drive, but it did take up much of the day just in transit.

Fibre optic cableToday was the real fireworks (not real ones of course), as a major Optus network outage not only severely affect our business, but much of the state in general.

We basically lost all connections to the Southern offices, and all our fixed and mobile phones were out too. Luckily enough, the internet in the Brisbane office was fine though.

This was pretty much a huge (especially PR) disaster for Optus. The local Telstra rep even contacted us trying to help us out (rubbing his hands with glee i can imagine). Our account manager at Optus even came to personally see us during the outage, as there really wasn't much else he could do because pretty much all of his telecommunications systems were on the blink.

It is desperately unlucky that both their fibre links to NSW managed to be out at the same, but I guess that your redundancy is only as good as major damage it comes up against, and this pretty much hit the spot in terms of that. Maybe they will invest in a third link down to Sydney, or possibly one to hook up with the NT/SA part of the network for a looping kind of redundancy.

Either way, I can see a lot of people losing their jobs over this. Also, this revelation on Whirlpool could cause a ruckus if true. It basically means that the Queensland Government is ultimately responsible for the dug-up cable, which is a total laugh considering Premier Bligh's already stupid comments this afternoon.

We'll wait and see on that one, but I hope the contractor and/or the Queensland Government's insurance is up to date, as one would expect Optus to come down extremely heavily on whoever cut that cable.

4 thoughts on “Eventful Start to the Working Week”

  1. Despite what she said, there are measures in place so that the Optus network can withstand a single break, but unfortunately (and quite unluckily for Optus) that redundant link had a hardware failure merely hours before.

    Generally she doesn't sound like she knows what she is talking about, and this post about her ministers chasing up the issue only to find it was someone under their employ responsible for it is quite funny.

    Reply
  2. i still don't get why her comments were stupid. dint she state the fact that the system was brought down by one single cable cut. isn't that what happened i mean yes the backup system was down but still takes nothing away from the fact that it was just one cable that brought it down so in essence isn't she correct?

    Reply
  3. not really, because it was the two separate incidents independent of one another brought it down: the hardware fault and the cable break.

    If they were both caused by the same incident i could follow that logic, but it really wasn't.

    Reply

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