At around 6pm last night, reports of outages on the Telstra network — again — started to emerge. The network began sporadically working again from 7:30pm onwards, and for the inconvenience Telstra are giving away a day of free data on Sunday April 3.
Image: Telstra
“We sincerely apologise to our customers for the inconvenience we have caused again,” a Telstra spokesperson said this morning. “As a way of saying we’re sorry we’ll be providing a free data day for all of our mobile customers on Sunday 3 April.
“We had a problem that triggered a significant number of customers to be disconnected from the network. Reconnecting them to the network caused congestion. We had a connection problem overseas impacting international roaming customers which then had a flow-on effect domestically.
Despite this all being very familiar, Telstra insists this issue was new one. Last time the problem was literally someone turning something they shouldn’t have off, and then on again. “The issue is not related to the outage that occurred in early February. The problem that repeated itself was in people reconnecting to the network.
“Following the last event we commenced a major process and engineering review of the network, which includes global network experts, to understand how it occurred, and while the two incidents are not related, we will add the lessons learned from this incident to that review.”
Last time this happened, and Telstra offered free data as compensation, 1,841 Terabytes was downloaded — making it Telstra’s busiest day on the network, ever.
Comments
12 responses to “Telstra Is Giving Angry Customers Another Day Of Unlimited Free Data”
Does this also apply for MVNO customers on Aldi?
I doubt it.
Another title for this article could be; Mobile Telstra customers download the internets day Sunday April 3.
Que them downloads people. 🙂
Already have unlimited home broadband. Thanks for nothing Telstra.
unless you have cable or NBN then 4G(x) is probably going to be faster 😉
True, but unless I sit in my car parked in the city I’m not seeing 4G(x). My 4G coverage at home is 1/4 the speed of the home ADSL. Also having unlimited broadband generally means I don’t have any downloads waiting or queued up #firstworldproblem
All this proves is that data obviously costs them next to nothing if can afford to give crap loads away. Which just means we are getting ripped off paying what we do for data.
We’ve known this for a long time, in fact wasn’t their in inquiry into exactly this? they were charging something like %2000 of what it costs them for the data
Yes. It also provides Telstra with valuable information about what their customers would do if they removed the data limits.
The data they gather stress-testing their network would be invaluable.
NBN Co is a serious threat to Telstra, and the ‘overbuild’ legislation doesn’t prevent them from offering 4G in NBN areas. Given that LTE (4G) is capable of delivering 100M/40M speeds over wireless, and our esteemed PM has given Telstra a great gift by dismantling Labor’s FTTP NBN and replacing it with a FTTN alternative that won’t scale beyond (arguably even up to) current speeds – I expect we’ll see some really competitive high-speed unlimited 4G offers from Telstra in the very near future.
These two outages in as many months are very suspicious. These sort of massive outages generally aren’t just someone unplugging something they shouldn’t (especially in the middle of the day!) – it’s more indicative of an unintended and unexpected effect caused by major behind-the-scenes system changes.
I bet some tech in a datacentre somewhere was sitting behind a laptop saying to themselves “No. That’s not affected by my upgrade. These systems are independent. Why did that break? How could that have broken? Surely it was a coincidence. It can’t have been me…. wait … No. No Way. You wouldn’t make it rely on that. Surely not. They did? what were they thinking! WHY?! IDIOTS! … Okay, is it going to be quicker to roll back, or fix this problem?”
I agree Telstra isn’t just doing this for customers’ forgiveness; They are doing it for the data they get from as you said the stress testing and what people would do with unlimited plans. I never thought about Turnbull inbed with Telstra idea either! But that makes sense right.
“Telstra are giving away a day of free data next Sunday.”
This Sunday is the 20th, next Sunday is the 27th. Article quotes Telstra saying its on the Sunday 3rd April?
So according to the heading its only the angry Telstra customers who get free data, what about the ambivalent ones?
Off you go and join vodafail