Telstra network review complete

After a troubled few months for Telstra, the company has announced a plan to commit $50 million toward network failure prevention. This comes after a process of review which delivered three key outcomes, according to COO Kate McKenzie, who spoke at an investor presentation in Melbourne yesterday.

“The first outcome is that we have confirmed the root causes of those disruptions and implemented a range of steps to significantly reduce the likelihood of these issues happening again,” said McKenzie.

McKenzie said this included increasing redundancy in the nodes, adding more capacity to the core network, introducing new processes and procedures for key network element restarts and improving resilience in Telstra’s international connectivity.

The second outcome related to increased investment in Telstra’s network monitoring and tools.

“In any highly sophisticated, world-class network like ours, there will always be disruptions, which is why we use sophisticated tools to help us better detect issues and allow stronger monitoring. We are going to make even further investments in this area to take advantage of some of the most cutting-edge technology becoming available,” McKenzie said.

“We will be specifically introducing more real-time traffic monitoring along with more real-time customer impact reporting. This will assist in getting better early warning of any traffic patterns in the network that might be a cause for concern.”

Telstra will also be spending around $25 million on installing this monitoring equipment.

The final action relates to improving Telstra’s recovery time for customers to set new global benchmarks.

“This is an incredibly large and sophisticated network and we can never give a guarantee that disruptions won’t occur from time to time. While our focus on the highest levels of reliability will continue to be relentless, we will also focus on being a world leader in the time to recovery when the unexpected happens,” McKenzie said.

“Essentially, when a disruption occurs, mobile users need to be re-registered or reconnected back onto the network. When large numbers of mobiles are trying to reconnect at the same time, there can be a delay in people being able to access the network.

“This is a common challenge for networks around the world — to ensure there is enough capacity in the network so that those reconnections take as little time as possible.

“As a result, we are investing an additional $25 million increasing our capacity to handle a large number of re-registrations occurring simultaneously.

“What this means is that in the event of a disconnection, a much larger number of customers will be able to re-register at the same time, so any disruption to services will be of a much shorter duration,” she said.