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Optus Outage
- Thread starter taztiger4
- Start date
I'm close too. Its certainly made me question whether it makes sense to have Optus for all my services. Mobile and internet. I'm considering splitting them with part on the Optus network and part on the Telstra network.
Have to say I'm a bit perplexed by the reaction to this. Its a stuff up, it was a pain in the arse, and Optus should be held to account, but the reaction has been OTT. I've had a mobile since 1999, probably half Optus and half Telstra. One major outage, might have been a couple more, but 1 in 8500 days? A lot of people don't seem to have any contingency plans, and don't seem to accept that things can go wrong with technology. I'm more surprised that it hasn't happened more often. If the power goes out, we get out the candles and buy some ice right? I've had one flat tyre in the last 30 years, I didn't sue the tyre company, or the roads department.
To be fair a lot of the news reports seem to be beating this up and manufacturing outrage and danger. I'm with Optus, some of my friends and colleagues are, we were annoyed, but got on with it.
To be fair a lot of the news reports seem to be beating this up and manufacturing outrage and danger. I'm with Optus, some of my friends and colleagues are, we were annoyed, but got on with it.
That's good practice and something I've followed for a while. Even though you might get a better deal if you bundle everything in, I prefer to pick and choose different vendors for my services to provide some reliability.
Agree to a point but the length of the outage was pretty decent. I imagine the engineer that pushed the config changes is now buying legs of lamb to give his *smile* a re-sleeve.
What this outage also shows is just how reliant we are becoming on tech for everything. Companies that don't have a dual vendor strategy for their mission critical services need to rethink their strategy.
Also a glimpse at why nation states have built huge teams of hackers to penetrate and disrupt other countries tech infrastructure. The next world war will be as much about technology disruption as it is about lobbing a grenade into a trench.
I'm with Aussie Broadband internet and Optus mobile. I had thought that AB used Optus but apparently they have their own network, at least partially. It didn't go down yesterday.
Many years ago when Telstra was called Telecom & they were a monopoly. I had a particularly harrowing experience with them. I won't go into details because it was quite involved & would be too boring to read.
Needless to say I swore that if ever in the future they had competition I would go with them rather than Telecom/Telstra. When Optus started up I changed to them.
If I ever change again I'd go with TPG never with that other mob.
Needless to say I swore that if ever in the future they had competition I would go with them rather than Telecom/Telstra. When Optus started up I changed to them.
If I ever change again I'd go with TPG never with that other mob.
exactly the same for me. Telstra burnt me so bad I swore off them, then memory faded, and their sales department is elite, I went back a few years later, then got burnt again, and even worse. What they did was incredibly bad, and it was incredibly hard and time consuming to fix. They are dead to me, I also could write a tome, but would be a dull read.
Optus service is also crap if anything goes wrong, but they don't have the total contempt that Telstra has, and as for the network, sure Telsta is better, but its extremely rare that it actually has an impact on your ability to communicate. I could count the times on one hand over the last 10 years, and that includes a lot of time in very remote areas, and even then it wasn't a big deal.
For me its their lack of communication and transparency that has made it worse. As a customer I feel they treated me wth contempt yesterday. Their customer service has been getting progessively worse and yesterday was the nadir.
They're all the same which is why that is the way to go. I have internet and TV on Optus and mobile on Telstra. Forget the bundles bs. I also withdraw cash at times from the ATM. Manual will never die.
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Fair enough. The lack of an explanation is a worry IMO. I'm also an Optus customer, and have also been a Testra customer, being treated with contempt when anything goes wrong is normal for both, the default setting. There's 2 things going on here, there's the system failure, and there's our ability, or inability, to cope with it.
As for the systems failure, in a competitive market I suppose there are two questions; 1) would the Telstra network ever be capable of having a similar failure? I don't know, my personal philosophy is that any tech can fail, and 2) If it did happen to a competitor, would they react any differently?
For me personally, Testra have treated me, and a close friend who has a small business, so badly repeatedly, over a long period, I'll take the occasional outage over having to deal with Telstra. The customer part of the broader social/ economic trend, big corporation cut customer service to the absolute bone to max their profits and share dividends, they will cut them to the absolute limit of consumer tolerance to the point where there is a revolt, then improve it slightly, keep it right on the edge of what most people will tolerate. Customer service when things go wrong, particularly if anything slightly unusual goes wrong that doesn't fit into their inline FAQs, is abysmal across the board.
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You’re aware that this wasn’t just a simple shut down of an individual’s mobile phone, yeah ? Critical public services were shut down eg the entire Melbourne rail network, hospitals were thrown into chaos, business operators lost critical services, EFTPOS went down and on and on.
Add to the fact as others have mentioned that this went on for hours and hours without anything from Optus and quite frankly I can understand why Optus clients are upset and why the media and government are asking questions.
I am aware of that yes. It was a major failure, they happen. The bigger concern for me goes to your point, the dependence and lack of contingency.
Remember the Longford gas explosion? Anyone with an electric HWS suddenly had a lot of friends.
Sure do, had to rely on a noisy wall mounted reverse cycle ac unit. It worked fine but was noisy as hell, couldn't hear the TV & there was no sub titles to help either.
The result from that disaster was the setting up of Port Campbell gas plant & the "National" gas sharing arrangement.
I wonder what will be done by Optus (if anything) to ensure they don't have a repeat of yesterday's debacle.
Internet & mobile service in our country is still horrendous. Will it ever get to the levels of other civilised nations?
