Telstra hit by another national phone outage
Every day across Australia our phone and internet providers suffer network problems and outages. Cell towers “go dark”, lines drop out and downloads slow to speeds that deserve to be on dial-up.
Where most telcos are realistic about this fact of life, however, Telstra has built its reputation on being the network with no equal – a titan of the wide, brown land.
Telstra has built its reputation on being the network with no equal – a titan of the wide, brown land.
Telstra has built its reputation on being the network with no equal – a titan of the wide, brown land. Photo: Jessica Hromas
This is the expensive shield that protects Telstra’s profits from falling prices at rival telcos – Dodo may be much cheaper but you assume it won’t be as good.
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But this is also why Telstra falls the hardest when millions of customers get a look behind the curtain every time the network crashes.
When Telstra suffered its first national outage in years last month, customers joked at its expense about the quality of the network.
When Telstra suffered its second major national outage last week, affecting the calls and downloads of 8 million customers, they were confused.
Now, with a third major outage affecting mobile and landline phone calls, customers are angry.
This is the company they have picked because it does not fail. The one that can cost hundreds of dollars more a year – the one they lock themselves into contracts for.
Now when Telstra is hit by the myriad tiny faults that every telco suffers, the effect will be amplified and feed into an organic whisper campaign that says, “Telstra’s network is not what it used to be”.
This may not be entirely fair – Telstra still genuinely reaches more parts of Australia than any other network, and its engineers are top notch.
But Vodafone Hutchison Australia’s experience proved that network problems can damage a telco’s reputation for years.
Only now, under the leadership of chief executive Inaki Berroeta, is Vodafone Australia starting to bounce back from the “Vodafail” network faults in 2010 that led to millions of customers leaving the company.
Telstra’s response to two major outages in a row has been to apologise and offer a day of free mobile data. It’s a good corporate response developed at Vodafone Australia that lets the telco demonstrate the strength of the network while giving something back.
At some point, however, it stops being good enough.
So far Telstra has blamed human error and overseas connections for the problems. But even if there isn’t a faulty data cable to point to, the systems in place don’t have enough redundancy to prevent cascade failures.
Telstra must acknowledge that it has a systemic problem on its hands and work hard to fix it. Three national outages in two months is unacceptable.
To be clear, Telstra’s customers won’t be rushing for the doors. But they will be increasingly open to products and plans from Telstra’s rivals and this is potentially dangerous for shareholders.
Phone and internet revenues in Australia are eroding and Telstra’s senior management plans to use the profits to find new sources of profit in eHealth and Asia.
If Telstra doesn’t look after users at home, however, it won’t have the money for any of these ventures.
And if another outage strikes, Telstra will start to look like all the other telcos that suffer network problems every day – only with a premium price tag it doesn’t deserve.
Read more: http://www.smh.com.au/business/why-telstras-network-problems-could-cause-longterm-damage-20160322-gnoa6j.html#ixzz456t7XsuA
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