Isolated Aussies left really isolated

Australia's Northern Territory lost all internet and phone connections yesterday, thanks to the failure of two separate Telstra circuits. The ten-hour outage meant that ATM and mobile networks were unavailable, and emergency service lines in some areas like Alice Springs also ceased operating. Isolated residents were not even …

[Matthew]

Telstra...

Nearly as bad as telecom NZ

[Anonymous Coward]

Haha,

Someone in the comments on a BT story said that this happens all the time in ausland.

[Jonathon Desmond]

Cause of failure....

... Thames Water???

[Tom Cooke]

Italian Job

Somebody obviously robbed a bank.

[DutchOven]

Strange

I thought they could have fallen back on their fail safe system - the bush telegraph.

[Anonymous Coward]

My pokie still works

Oh wait...no it doesn't.

[Anonymous Coward]

So, whose SigInt system was installed?

Interesting that both cables should mysteriously fail at the same time. If someone was feeling paranoid they might wonder whether it was planned.

I'm sure any government would find it handy to be able to intercept all communications.

[garbo]

Electric scratchies?

..."beloved scratchie and pokie machines were down."?

Last time I bought a $2 scratchie in Sydney it was printed on a matchbox-sized card and I scraped off the masking film to reveal the symbols. No batteries or wall plug needed. Are they going very hi-tech in the Top End?

[Rob Moss]

That's why we all love Telstra so much

They're both on the ball, and have working fail-over systems that we're all paying them a premium for

/end of sarcasm

[Jeff]

It's only the NT

Home to very few, and very few of those are productive members of society. The full day's outage has harmed the GDP of the country by about $1.65

[Brett Leach]

Telstra has suffered a lot of outages recently.

I've had my broadband disappear 3 times in the past week or so, and calls to tech support gave me a recorded message telling me the outage was wide spread each time. One of these outages was for several hours and a tech told me some customers had been offline for as much as 5 days.

The frequency and scope of these outages, tempts me to think that it was more of a security issue than a technical one.

[Tim Bates]

Telstra investigating?

Telstra investigating the caused of such a long outage? Not bloody likely!

They only ever admit a problem if mainstream media notice it. Why would they care what caused it?

[Anonymous Coward]

Telstra?

As a long time "fight to the death" and now EX customer of Telstra......

While putting two tin cans together with a piece of string and calling it an upgrade - while not much of an option;

Compared to Telstra - it's cheap, it's reliable and it doesn't suffer from rotten water soaked infrastructure and an incompetent and greedy management.

Telstra hardware in Australia is JUNK.