MELBOURNE – Telstra has called in international experts to assist with an urgent review of its infrastructure in the wake of this week’s latest system outage, its third in two months, which has seen it receiving claims for compensation by affected businesses.It is also looking at the possibility of compensating some business customers who claim to have suffered losses in productivity and profits due to the run of outages.
A spokesman said Telstra would consider compensation on a case-by-case basis, but stressed there was no guarantee the claims would be granted.
An initial examination has suggested a gateway card failure contributed to the latest outage, leaving fixed-line and mobile customers both unable to make or receive calls.
The outage began at noon on Monday and took more than an hour to resolve, with Victorian and Tasmanian customers the worst affected. The outage followed a much worse event in February which left three million customers without service for some hours, and an even more serious outage last week that affected 8 million customers for around 3 hours.
The combination of events has raised questions about the state of Telstra’s network infrastructure, much of which is supplied by top international supplier Ericsson.
Vodafone – which several years ago had much worse outages, leading to several million subscribers quitting its service and moving to Telstra or Optus, resulting in the company being nicknamed Vodafail – was quick to pounce on Telstra’s latest misfortune.
It offered any customers willing to switch back to Telstra a month of free access – which it contrasted with Telstra’s offer of one day of free data to compensate for the latest outage. (Anyone considering taking up the offer will have to move quickly: the Vodafone offer terminates at 5pm on Tuesday.)
