Wednesday, July 16, 2008

Telecommunication outage in Queensland

A RUPTURED telecommunications cable shut down mobile and landline phone calls and internet connections across Queensland and in some parts of New South Wales for at least four hours today.

Hospitals, businesses and Brisbane Airport were affected by the outage after a fibre optic cable near Molendinar, west of Surfer's Paradise, was broken by workers laying a pipe.

The news report seems to be back-to-front from the report by the spokesperson from Optus interviewed on radio yesterday afternoon.

First, there was an equipment failure at Stanthorpe in the Granite Belt on Monday night. Repairers and equipment were flown in to fix the fault. This happens to be the back-up for SE Queensland.

Then, yesterday morning just prior to eight, before the Stanthorpe fault could be rectified, the optical fibre cable was cut on the Gold Coast.

The fearless Queensland Premier, Anna Bligh, has been vocal in her condemnation of the incident.

Federal Communications Minister, Stephen Conroy, said last night in an interview with ABC drive host that because of the great reliance these days on telecommunications in all our day to day living, that this outage is unacceptable and that it's time for telecommunications companies to work together to use their combined networks and provide the best service for customers (paraphrased). No link.

It's extremely unfortunate and annoying for the people who were inconvenienced by the outage, and businesses which lost money. However, is there a way that this kind of problem can be completely negated? Can there be contingency plans for every outage?

1 comment:

Boy on a bike said...

So Queenslanders were returned to the Dark Ages.

What's so different about that from the usual day to day in Qld?