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Thread: Telstra grappling with another mobile outage

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    Angry Telstra grappling with another mobile outage

    And yet again telstra fail, ive been waiting on critical business call that I now cant receive, I'm so pissed off with this mobile service.


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    From the ABC news article "There were also widespread complaints about Telstra's outage page not working."

    Fark the outage page just fix it.

    I now have 4g internet again and phone working in ACT.

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    Welcome to the world run by India.

    Telstra outsources it's network design and configurations to india, the Global Operations Center is also now mostly run by indians who don't have a fvcking clue and outright refuse to escalate serious problems to Australia for real people to handle, organise and problem solve rather than blindly following a script before ignoring the problem and several days before somebody who can actually co-ordinate the repairs discovers what has been going on.

    Fvcktard accounting graduates who are flying the company into the ground by selling off assets, minimising staff, minimising training and maximising outsourcing to make their short term KPI's look good while long term company growth is sacrificed. The share price is now revealing their incompetence on a scale which will make the Ansett look like an Australian bank. A job which takes two Australians 15 minutes to perform now takes the better part of 12 hours for brown town to work what page of the script they are on meanwhile the one tech left on the ground in Australia is waiting for Mohammad to finish his lunch.

    And that is just the business side of things. Lets not forget where national security now resides.
    Now it's a long shot to think that one of these mindless off shore controllers could actually co-ordinate anything more complex than a bicycle lock, but should that be the case, you can imagine what sort of damage they could do with real intelligence, cooridination and planning.

    And then there is out of band data mining which most companies that off shore are completely oblivious to.
    And it's not just the big T.
    Yes I am an agent of Satan, but my duties are largely ceremonial.

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    I was quite surprised to see on a map of where the Trunk Line cables were laid across the Country.
    This was published a few years after the laying of the Co-Axial cable connecting Sydney to Melbourne.
    At the time Orange in the Central West was the furthest place West in the State to be connected into the system but it was WHERE the Cable was that caught my attention.
    Seeing Orange was 'in the West' I thought the route would cross the Blue Mountains to connect but it didnt, instead it went SOUTH heading towards somewhere like Harden to make the connection.
    If I remember correctly, Canberra was a Spur which surprised me.
    This map was brought to mind when a recent outage took out an area between Orange to Bowral......Look at the Map and see what sort of Country lies between the 2 areas and its easy to see that no one in their right minds would lay cables there nor have they, it still goes via the 'Scenic Route'.
    The problem is the system seems to be built like a House of Cards and when something happens, the effect can take out areas some distance away.
    A few years ago a cable was damaged near Mooney Mooney 40 kms North of Sydney and it took out much of the Mobile services at DUBBO, some 300kms away as the Crow flies
    I stand unequivicably behind everything I say , I just dont ever remember saying it !!

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    In terms of where the cables run Gordon, it's not actually all that confusing.
    The first thing to remember is that the cables connect centers of population. That seems obvious.

    A good example in this case is Sydney to Dubbo. The cable doesn't run in a straight line in one piece from Sydney. The route taken can vary greatly. Sometimes it follows the road, other times it just cuts a straight path overland.
    But like transport, it goes via towns along the way. When the fibre network was built, it was PDH, so the hierarchy was disassembled and reassembled at each exchange.
    Later on fibre junctions were directly connected to form fibre trunks.
    As the major trunks fill up, more diverse routes are used to provide protection and make use of idle infrastructure. So a trunk from Lithgow to Bathurst might follow the highway and carry most of the traffic. Another link would go via Oberon.
    Oberon might only use a pair of fibres in each direction, so that would leave 11 pairs that aren't used. Later Oberon might be connected directly to Orange to provide diversity to the Bathurst to Orange route.
    So lots of these short haul junctions end up carrying long haul traffic in diverse paths. And that shouldn't effect network performance, it should make it more resilient. (usually it does).

    But there is more to that story. The next is understanding how the 000 network, which sits on top of the phone network which itself sits on top of the trunk/junction network.
    So what happens when you make a phone call?
    Lets assume it's a landline. I'm going to over simplify the process. You place a call to your neighbour. You phone call goes to the local exchange, which then switches it back to your neighbour.
    If you ring your friend in a neighbouring suburb, the call goes to your local exchange, down to the group switch and then to their local exchange to their phone. No mysteries so far.
    If you ring your mum in another city: The call goes to you local exchange, to the group switch in your city, to the group switch in her city, to her local exchange and onto her phone.

    The junctions from the local exchanges are one hop. But the trunks between the group switches can take multiple hops through what is now basically a cloud. Even though you can break it down to smaller components.

    Now you place a 000 call. I had to sit down with friends and we had to all rethink how this happens.
    The first thing is the call is picked up by a telstra 000 operator. These operators are everywhere and anywhere. You can dial 000 in Tasmania and the call can be answered by a Perth operator.
    This diversity works in favour of the emergency network because it is unlikely that all the operators will be busy.
    Of course you can see that the diversity also works against it if some random link fails and the network does not detect it and protection switch it.
    000 calls can fall off the network. That is what was happening. The media are of course beating it up. It would have only been a few random calls that were switched down that junction.

    When a 000 call is made, the local exchange switches the call to the group switch and it routes the call to the nearest 000 operator. If that operator is on that group switch, then that is the path it takes.
    If that operator is busy, then that group switch will re-route the call to another operator or another group switch. Like a hot potato the call can be passed though several group switches looking for the first available operator.

    So because a Victorian caller might have been routed to a Brisbane operator, that call might have taken that path.
    Re-dialing probably would have succeed because the next path was randomly routed to a new operator.
    The point is however that no 000 call should ever fail.

    The story is slightly different for mobile phones. And that is different for each mobile phone technology.
    In the 2G GSM days calls were all routed through the GSM switch, which was in each capital city.
    If you made a mobile phone call from Cocos Island to another local GSM phone, the call path was....
    Handset to local base station, via satellite to Perth, then fibre to Adelaide to the switch and then back the same path.
    The delay over GSM was "annoying" over very long paths. That path was a 75,000km round trip. Short paths say from Sydney to Perth the delay was not noticeable.

    3G is a bit different. The call is established by a central switch, but the call is then switched via an OSPF from handset to handset.
    SO like above, that path might be switched over a different path to balance traffic to less utilised trunks.

    4G is different again. The call is established and switched locally and directly. It's basically no different to an TCPIP network. The overheads and control are still supervised by a central switch/office so if that link is lost, then 4G will not work.
    And even though 3G/4G often share their backhaul, it is possible for one to work while the other has failed for a number of reasons.

    If a part of you network is controlled by unthinking off shore employees that can only follow set scripts, then when shit hits the fan, they have no idea how to detect there is a problem or how to fix it.
    They're terrified to hand any problem back to Australians for fear of looking incompetent.
    Senior management are also myopically incompetent to the failure of off shore operations because they do not set KPI's which are not gamed by either the foreign operations or their own internal accountants and middle managers.

    I suspect that if Telstra had an internal "customer feedback" for it's Indian GOC operations, the feedback would be full of abusive comments and expletives.
    Last edited by trash; 22-05-18 at 09:07 PM.
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    Hahahahahahaha............

    The fact that there's a highway to hell and a stairway to heaven says a lot about the anticipated traffic flow.

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    Optus was fine

    I think i had to tether to 4 or 5 Telstra customers on Sunday tho.... The flogs
    If u want to go on an expedition get a Land Rover, if u want to come home from an expedition get a Landcruiser!

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    Trash, its easy to understand that for many reasons, services like Communications cables and Natural Gas pipelines cannot always go what appears to be the 'Straightest point'.
    Just a few K's from me is a 'run of cables plated Telstra, Optus AT&T as wel as the Natural Gas spur that terminates in Lithgow.
    Funny you should mention Oberon as I think it was Optus has recently run an Optical Fibre 'Back Bone' cable from a junction point near the Lithgow Maximum security Prison out to Oberon utilizing the Power lines connecting the 2 areas. From memory they had to add about 10 poles to complete the route.

    I meant my comment to explain why a problem 'somewhere' can affect 'someone' many kilometres away.

    Your explanation of how the 000 system works was damned interesting and proves a point that today its fairly easy to operate from a distance away.
    We were discussing how today a Railway Train Controllor could be located on the Moon and with proper communication, can operate equipment and direct Train Movements anywhere on the Planet.
    Last edited by gordon_s1942; 23-05-18 at 01:28 PM.
    I stand unequivicably behind everything I say , I just dont ever remember saying it !!

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    We were discussing how today a Railway Train Controllor could be located on the Moon and with proper communication, can operate equipment and direct Train Movements anywhere on the Planet.

    Sh don't tell the Indians!

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    You don't need Indians. Trains can drive themselves with minimal effort. I'm amused that they didn't lose their drivers 30 years ago.

    There are many driverless trains, but most of them have annoying O&HS slow doors and lots of beeps and warnings and soothing music.

    I prefer the way they do things on the Russian metro. You get a warning, "Door's closing" >BOOM< ... if you're not in or out of the carriage then both pieces of you will be in both places at the same time.
    Nobody gets stuck in Russian train doors, well, not a second time. I saw a big tough guy with army boots get his toes caught in the door. The face and sound he made was similiar to a constipated panda.
    Yes I am an agent of Satan, but my duties are largely ceremonial.

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    Managment saving bucks with outsourcing to put short term profits in their pockets usually ends in tears for the rest of us.
    Outages for the public, heavy share price drops for the investor, even the dividends could now be in question -> free fall.

    Telstra might end up not even having the funds to implement 5G and if it does, might be so hampered with failure that it becomes useless.
    Update: A deletion of features that work well and ain't broke but are deemed outdated in order to add things that are up to date and broken.
    Compatibility: A word soon to be deleted from our dictionaries as it is outdated.
    Humans: Entities that are not only outdated but broken... AI-self-learning-update-error...terminate...terminate...

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    Back in the day, when Telecom still ruled the roost, I was one of the techs that looked after the MAC (Manual Assistance Centre - operators to you lot) in Darwin. our observation was if they ever centralise this stuff (which they did) service would suffer badly. All the operators knew that "jackie" always rang on "Thursday" from back of Oenpelli to talk to his missus in Katherine. I often heard them tell Jackie that his Missus was in hospital in Darwin at the moment, and put him through there. That was when service was just that!
    I'm out of my mind, but feel free to leave a message...

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    20 years ago I was building new equipment where once there were operators.
    We started building around them even before they were being pushed out.
    We used to talk to them as we were working. One day I asked them if they liked Indian food.
    "Oh yes, it's ok!"
    <indian accent> "Hello Telstra Australia, what number pleeeeease?"

    It wasn't the subcontinent that ended up killing them, it was skynet.
    They had to train the voice recognition system that eventually replaced them.

    It was funny because a lot of people were shitty about having to talk to a robot rather than a real person.
    So somebody who wanted Dominos Pizza might as for that and if the AI was sure, it would connect the call without a human in the loop.
    But if the AI wasn't sure, then it would pass the call onto the operator with it's best guess appearing on the screen. The operator would then ask the person what they wanted and connect them and rank the AI result to it.

    Some of the time people would just tell the robot they wanted "Fvck you Telstra" and the AI wasn't sure what they wanted. The call would be forwarded to the human operator who would ask them and they would say "Dominos Pizza" even though it would say on the operator's screen 'fvck you telstra'. They would forward the call and rank the AI as correct.

    Of course even skynet got it's just deserts because google has assimilated it like a borg cube
    and now ...
    Last edited by trash; 24-05-18 at 08:31 PM.
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    I wasted 20 minutes trying to get onto a human at Ikea yesterday their bloody AI didn't offer an option to allow me to query an invoice, it eventually did find a real person to talk to. They were extremely helpful but could not solve my issue over the phone (I actually wanted to GIVE them money) and I am still waiting for a return phone call. My nearest Ikea is 2 hours drive away, so I'd rather only make the trip once, rather than twice!
    I'm out of my mind, but feel free to leave a message...

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