More than a million Optus customers were unable to use mobile and land line telephones, or reach Web sites outside Queensland for more than four hours when Gold Coast City Council workers severed a critical interstate fibre optic cable this week.
Amid buck-passing over the incident between Optus and the council, including a photo released by the telco clearly showing a cable warning sign two metres from the site and fears of compensation, questions were raised concerning just how an entire state can be crippled by a rogue hoe.
A further disruption occurred in a separate incident when a major point of presence failed, effectively marooning the state.
Peering networks, including PIPE, offered a hand, but analysts say Optus should have had a solid disaster recovery plan in place before.
Were you caught up by the cable cut? Should Optus have had a better disaster recovery plan in place? Or is it unreasonable to expect the telco to build redundancy across our vast land mass?
Click here to vent.
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Comments
About time..
there was some bad news about Queensland rather than the doom and gloom of NSW!
hope the nbn doesnt suffer the same fate
not personally affected by the outage, however I did notice several sites like including Whirlpool were down during the same time frame, dont know if they are hosted by optus though..... i just hope the national broadband network will have sufficient redundancy so that the entire nation doesnt go offline if some wild hoe severs a single cable!