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Ericsson, Cisco, Juniper to help Australian incumbent mitigate risk of further outages.
Telstra suppliers Ericsson, Cisco and Juniper Networks are helping it with an end-to-end review of its networks following several high-profile outages, it emerged on Monday.
The Australian incumbent has suffered three separate incidents this year – one in February, two in March. The first two left mobile customers unable to get online or make calls, while the most recent one affected mobile, fixed VoIP, and fixed telephony subscribers.
"We know that our customers rely on us and that’s why we were so disappointed by what has happened," said Telstra COO Kate McKenzie, in a speech at the CommsDay Summit in Sydney, which was published on the telco’s Website.
Telstra has already increased capacity and improved traffic management in its signalling network, and has nearly finished upgrading its Home Location Register–Front End (HLR-FE) in order to improve resilience, she said.
Furthermore, "in conjunction with our global partners Ericsson, Cisco and Juniper we have assembled a team of internal and external engineering experts to do an end-to-end review of our network," McKenzie said. "Our focus is on ensuring our network is the best available and rebuilding our customers’ trust by meeting their expectations every day."
She explained that the first outage, which struck on 9 February, was caused by an ailing signalling node that manages 3G and 4G data sessions and voice calls.
In line with standard procedure, the node was isolated from the rest of the network, she continued, but the subsequent restart was "initiated incorrectly," causing 15% of all the mobile subscribers connected through it to re-register on the network simultaneously, resulting in an overload.
McKenzie didn’t offer as detailed an explanation for the second outage, which occurred on 17 March, just that "a significant number" of international roaming customers, followed by domestic customers, were "unexpectedly disconnected" from the network.
"When they all attempted to reconnect at the same time…we saw a period of overload in the database used to register devices," she said.
Telstra changed the configuration of its mobile network and limited the volume of signalling traffic coming from 4G devices reconnecting to the network, which "reinstated network stability," McKenzie said.
The most recent outage, which struck on 22 March, primarily affected Tesltra customers in Victoria and Tasmania, who were unable to make or receive calls.
In a bid to appease customers, Telstra has held two ‘Free Data Days’, the first in February, the second on Sunday, giving customers 24 hours of free mobile data.
On the first day, Telstra’s network experienced a record volume of data traffic, 1,841 terabytes. The second free data day recorded traffic of 2,686 terabytes, "which is three times the amount of data downloaded on a normal weekday and 46% more than the amount downloaded on Free Data Day in February," McKenzie said.
"These two days of customers sending and receiving huge volumes of data across our network have given us a glimpse of the future," she added. "Customers have bigger and bigger expectations of what mobile technology and connectivity will offer – and we are determined to meet, if not exceed, those expectations."
