Telstra has begun work to make its network more resilient to issue like those which caused significant network outages recently, while it’s customers make the most of a Free Data Day positioned as a make-good for the same outages.
Telstra Chief Operations Officer Kate McKenzie highlighted a few of the internal initiates Telstra has started to protect its network, while speaking at the Commsday Summit in Sydney. Identifying that a flood of customer registrations was behind the most recent outages, McKenzie said that steps were being taken to minimise the risk of a reoccurrence.
“We are well into a thorough review of the network. I am leading this review and it involves our own specialist teams as well as external experts from around the world. We have already progressed short- and medium-term actions to improve resilience and robustness in the mobile network,” McKenzie said.
“Changes have been implemented to increase the capacity and path diversity of critical signalling channels and a temporary layer of traffic management protection has been added to minimise the impact of events like the ones we saw on 9 February and 17 March. Within a few days we expect to augment capacity in a key platform (Home Location Register – Front End aka HLR-FE) that manages our customers’ subscription data.”
McKenzie also pointed to the $5 billion Telstra has already committed to expand its network capabilities and reach so that its 4G network will cover 99 percent of the population by mid-2017.
As well, Telstra will hope to be first to publicly trial 5G network technologies in 2018 in the Gold Coast during the Commonwealth Games.
Free Data flogging
While the Telstra tech scramble to resolve these recent issues, Telstra customers went to town on the network to make the most of the promised Free Data day on April 3.
McKenzie told the Commsday crowd that in total Telstra customers downloaded 2.686TB of data during the 24-hour period, or enough data to stream an episode of Game of Thrones 5.1 million times.
A single user has claimed to have downloaded 994GB of data by himself, saying that he used the Free Data Day to download the entirety of Wikipedia as well as numerous episodes of his favourite TV shows.
Other Telstra customers did not have such a positive experience, though. Many customers have reported that heavy network congestion made the network unusable during the Free Data Day.
Another Telstra customers charted the network performance in his area over the day by running a speed test every 10 minutes. His results were not in Telstra’s favour either, with slow speeds and high latency between 8am and midnight. You read about this experiment here.
amophoto.net / Shutterstock.com
Joseph Hanlon
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