Optus Mobile was immobile yesterday

Alex Zaharov-Reutt
Friday, 01 August 2008 22:28

IT Industry - Strategy

If you have an Optus Mobile phone and couldn’t make calls yesterday, you weren’t alone: customers in NSW, Victoria and Queensland of both Optus and Virgin Mobile reported widespread issues in an outage that lasted 8 hours.

It was only a couple of weeks ago that Optus customers in the Australian states of Queensland and New South Wales (NSW) were the victims of an accidental cut fibre optic cable, done by a contractor to the Gold Coast City Council.

The cut fibre took out broadband and mobile services for at least 4 hours until the break was repaired, and was compounded by the fact maintenance work was to be done on Optus’ backup connection on the very day the cable was cut.

Now Optus has experienced a fresh set of problems for 3G mobile users, many simply unable to make calls or access the 3G Internet, in an 8 hour outage that had consumers most annoyed.

What made matters worse is reports that Optus Mobile customer service staff were advising customers to turn their phones off and then on again, at relatively regular intervals.

Unfortunately that advice appeared to be worthless, with some consumers claiming a simpler, temporary solution that actually worked: setting one’s 3G phone to connect to Optus’ 2G GSM network instead and bypassing the 3G network altogether.

Of course, any Optus customer then wanting to access the Internet on or through their phones would only have been able to connect at slower GPRS speeds in most areas, but 2G calls and data is better than no calls or data at all.

The outage happened on the same day that Optus subsidiary Virgin Mobile announced 5GB iPhone 3G data plans - see our previous article “Virgin pops iPhone cherry with massive 5GB bang!”

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