I moved my number from 3 to Optus today, as 3 gave me pretty much no signal at my new home, it would blink out all the time which is of course useless. In terms of bill-readability and general service both Telstra and Optus fail, for coverage I’d prefer Telstra but their data plans (and actually any plans) just suck. So that’s how Optus won. On great merit, eh ;-)
I have a Vodafone 3G data dongle for my laptop so I don’t want Voda for mobile; I want/need to spread the risk in case one of the telcos decides to dig up a cable again and be dead for a day… you may recall that’s happened a few times over recent years and since the telcos and the govt (despite Premier Bligh’s “unacceptable” declarations at the time!) are apparently incapable of building resilience into either the network or the legislation, I’m sorting it out myself.
My home/office ADSL is now Internode on an Agile DSLAM, so that’s different as well. At the old house I was on iiNet which backs on to Optus, as does 3 mobile. So this is how, when Optus dug up their cable, both my ADSL and mobile failed. That was the day I walked into the Vodafone shop and got the dongle.
The landline/mobile/Internet networks are essentially integrated, but worse is that the telcos are quite interdependent (such as iiNet and 3 using parts of the Optus network). With the aforementioned outage some businesses had Telstra backup links, but as Telstra didn’t receive prior notification of the outage (yea, next time you plan to dig up a cable, please call Telstra a day early will you!? -tssk) they couldn’t quite handle the extra traffic. Neat when a failover mechanism doesn’t actually work when you need it.
The mobile networks each only have a single central server, which for most if not all networks is based in Sydney. So if you sever the primary cable that connects Queensland to Sydney, and stuff up the backup cable, then not only do you sever all landline, Internet and mobile connections out of Queensland for that provider, but in addition you can’t actually make calls on your mobile within Queensland!
Yes indeed, Premier Bligh, unacceptable… you said that the first time, and it happened again… and it’ll repeat in the future, until you actually push for federal action. Given there’s currently a labour government (and in most other states also) you have some chance of making something happen… later perhaps not so much.
Part of the reason for this single point of failure is billing – in some cases it could work but activity cannot be billed… telcos of course don’t like that, but it’s their choice to not have resilience in their network so I reckon it’s their problem. Another option would be to create multiple networks (usually done per country, but that’s just an arbitrary choice, so why not states?), as in <telco> Queensland, which when you go to another state then roams to <telco> NSW, and so on. That’s just a technical choice, it simply means that if any part fails, not everything falls down.
Internet and mobile are not luxury extras in Australia, many of us (and definitely businesses) rely on either one or both. Imagine being a plumber or gardener, without your mobile you are simply out of business. Having some service level agreement with your telco that might give you a penalty payment in case of outages just doesn’t cut it! The problems are largely preventable, yet business decisions/imperatives/processes cause them to keep (re)occurring, even within the same telco/network. It’s not just about competition on the front end.