Telstra CEO Andy Penn has spoken to the media this morning to give an update on the national outage that affected Telstra’s mobile services yesterday afternoon and into the evening. He acknowledged that Telstra experienced an issue, that was not itself the cause of yesterday’s outage, but the reconnection of customers to the network following that issue caused mass disruption and congestion.
The underlying issue appears to have been with an offshore link interfering with roaming customers, and when that link was reconnected or reconfigured, a more significant issue was caused which affected much of Telstra’s network.
In recognising that 8 million customers were affected (up to 50% of Telstra’s network), Telstra will be providing another data free day, as it did following the last major outage just last month. This will be on Sunday April 3rd (in two weeks).
We’ll update this story once more details become available, both of the incident itself, and the steps Telstra took and will take to make sure it won’t happen again.
I hate data free days. It just congests the network by individuals who try and see what records they can break on downloads (Thanks to media reporting it will be worse this time).
Congestion, with its effects on the network, is but one of the possible problems related to data free periods in place of monetary compensation. It’s what the business mentality in all its perversity hopes for, regardless of customer pain and frustration. Bad customer experience can and often does have whatever degree of backlash, but the foibles of the business mind are willing to take a change in order to satiate their proliferous desire for profit over customer satisfaction. The way in which business, similar to government, works in this crazy world and screwed up society is more often than not… Read more »
I guess these issues can happen on any network, but three outages in the past month or so for me is pushing it. And who needs a free data day on a weekend? I’ll be at home with wifi. Besides, I don’t need more data. How about free credit?
Tel$tra are far too greedy to want to offer credit to lowly customers…
True. It’s interesting that they decided to wait until next weekend for the free data weekend. Are they hoping that people will forget about it and therefore not utilise it, or is it something to do with the Easter weekend?
Everything, unless one is actually in the loop and given every particle of information, is pure speculation. Whatever the reason, however, the point remains and shall always be so until Tel$tra changes its mindset (which I don’t see happening), control, manipulation and extortion to enlarge the profit margin is the key to everything Tel$tra does and to its sociopathic personality.
I agree, but I’m not convinced that the other large telcos are full of empathy and generosity for their customers either. Which provider are you with? 🙂
What you assert is, of course, totally correct and I am pleased you’re aware that other telcos are also controlling, manipulative and extort. That which differs is, naturally, the degrees to which they do it. In my view, it’s difficult to find any business with pure and altruistic motives in everything they do – similar to governments. Usually, the motive is always tied to self-interest, as it is with humans per se. Insoafar as the human approach is concerned, as you appear to realise, empathy doesn’t go much in hand with modern or even old business practice. Having said this,… Read more »
Because giving something away for free costs them, like all business, very little / nothing. Giving a discount is giving away real money. Giving something which you normally pay for for free also has a perceived value greater than the cost of providing it and of buying it (as a customer).
Exactly so. Humans tend to take the way of the lowest denominator, which has always been the problem with the species.
Value, as you somewhat realise if relative, as it’s merely perceived value.
A monetary system doesn’t work, never has worked and will never work. As a societal construct it’s fundamentally flawed, irrespective of arguments to the contrary by its advocates.