How unlucky can you get? Optus loses both Sydney - Brisbane fibre links

By Stuart Corner
Tuesday, 15 July 2008 11:44

Networking

Optus has suffered simultaneous outages on both its optic fibre cables linking Brisbane and Sydney causing major disruption to fixed and mobile voice and data traffic, and Internet access.

Optus' links to the global Internet are routed on submarine cables all of which land in NSW and the disaster prompted calls from Pipe Networks for a new international link from Brisbane.

Optus' director of network operations, Peter Sutherland, issued a statement saying that Optus had experienced a hardware fault in South East Queensland late on Monday night (14 July) affecting its back up link and that this had been followed by a fibre optic cable being broken near Molendinar west of Surfers Paradise which affected services to Queensland. "Services were restored at 12 noon today as technicians repaired damage to Optus' cable. The cut was caused by excavation work by non Optus contractors installing a pipe on the Gold Coast."

Sutherland said that services impacted had been fixed line voice and data to and from Queensland; mobile for customers located in Queensland; Internet browsing for Queensland customers to servers outside Queensland; and some mobile services in northern New South Wales.

Optus gave no indication of the scale or impact on customers of the outage saying only "We apologise to our customers for the inconvenience this has caused them." However Pipe Networks CEO, Bevan Slattery described it as "[a] full scale telecommunications catastrophe [that] affected much of the two states, including the financial, health and transport sectors, including Brisbane Airport."

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