It definitely sounded like they had an agenda and we’re making it out to be the first time any telco has had an outage. But, it did get some very good answers from the CEO. From the snippets I’ve seen I think she did very well.
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Don’t get me wrong, Optus has some real issues that they need to fix on the back of both this and the cyber incident, but yesterday won’t result in anything happening. All it is is an opportunity for a few politicians to grandstand on the matter
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I think the major thing the government is pissed off with is the fact an emergency line was completely offline for 10 minutes and this doesn’t even include the fact the amount of businesses that were relying on Optus for Eft transactions.
And ACMA is investigating this - it has become apparent that the system allows open access to permit emergency calls isn’t working as designed that may or may not be directly an Optus issue.
and processes exist for impacted customers to claim compensation. The reality is outages happen (and it is why the likes of Telstra and Vodafone arent making a song and dance about calling out Optus, they know it could easily happen to them), even if Optus offered 99.9% uptime, that is still 8hrs a year of outages.
Optus needs to make some serious improvements in some of its operations and their governance - recent events have clearly shown this.
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Emergency calls, sure - that’s an vital service.
But businesses replying on Optus. That’s on them. They’ve made a commercial decision to use Optus and not have a backup in place. Everyone on Optus has the option of having some sort of backup with an alternate carrier if having uninterrupted service is that important.
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I highly doubt many businesses would have a backup option.
Yeah I agree, most modern Eftpos machines have the ability to have a WiFi back-up so not sure why they couldn’t have used the VDSL/Fibre internet in there shops to still take money, song and dance and poor me
You wouldn’t expect the local coffee shop to have a backup but i tried to call the ANZ bank during the outage and I could not get through
I would expect the ANZ bank to have a backup. Many call centre providers like Amazon Connect have backends with multiple providers and you as a customer you don’t know what providers are being used to handle the calls that is handled by AWS. Most of the time it isn’t relevant as long as they don’t have too much capacity with just one provider. It just automatically fails over and you as the customer don’t even know that it has happened. I didn’t hear of customers using Amazon Connect having issues.
Yeah, we had a similar system in place at my old job but only because it was a major supermarket. As I said I doubt there would be a lot of places that had workarounds in place.
If connectivity is critical to a business, then they should have alternate means, otherwise, you have to accept there is a risk of being offline if something were to happen.
Given the outage also took out Optus’ fixed services, that would make it difficult for those who have connectivity through them.
Put it this way small businesses are exactly that. There not major corporation setups like major supermarkets, banks and other places are.
The size of the business is irrelevant (and as we’ve seen, there are plenty of large businesses that were impacted as well) - my point still stands.
You’ll find that any provider will give limited guarantees of connectivity (even under an SLA) - if that is not good enough, then alternative means of connectivity are needed to lower the risk.
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Well, it doesn’t really, if many large businesses are still impacted even with all these things in place tbh I really don’t think a small business would have avoided it.
Sure, but that’s their choice. The capability is there to have a backup at a reasonable price.
That’s why the backup should be with a different provider using a different technology. eg. if you’re EFTPOS is connected by Optus 4G, have your NBN fixed line internet with Telstra. That way you’re protected from an NBN or mobile outage and a Telstra or Optus outage.
Just because a business is large doesn’t mean it is well prepared. In fact I’ve found big businesses can often have less flexible arrangements.
It really just comes down to the risk you take in business - business is a game of various risks for the chance of a higher reward. Outages happen. In fact I’d say it’s safe to assume that some sort of outage will happen about once a year. So what’s that one day a year worth. Say a backup connection is $50/month - so $600 per year. Will you lose more than $600 if you miss a whole day’s trade? If the answer is yes, pay for a backup. If not, you take the risk knowing that you could miss a day’s trade during the year.
The size of the business has no correlation with their level of preparedness - some of our largest businesses in this country don’t have additional services as a contingency in the event of an outage, they accept the risk.
Many of the retail places I’ve dealt with have their EFTPOS running through their main internet connection with 4G failover. So, the opposite of how some are making it sound here. Most retail shopfronts have those options and it’s often only the mobile type businesses where they’d have the 4G terminal as the default.
While I think the Senate questioning the other day was a bit full on, all oeprators have had enough incidents that have raised important questions now about how technology has shifted, our reliance on the technologies and the huge impacts that are had when those networks go down.
I’m assuming that if people had dialed 112 from mobiles that it would have gone through to the emergency services (assuming it wasn’t the emergency services themselves on Optus) but many don’t know about the 112 option and how it is worldwide and will bypass to go on any carrier it can get onto.
I’d expect that next year there will be some new requirements for all the carriers and there will be some changes to try and prevent anything like this happening again.
I think she handled the Optus outage apaulingly but yes she is the overall manager but she wasn’t solely to blame. She would be taking guidance from others. They should also be held to account. It shows that they need a change in the culture of upper management at Optus. One change should be removing Gladys who was virtually found guilty of corruption which would be a good start.
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Google Maps has changed its colour scheme and it really looks unappealing now. A very unpopular change for most users.
All roads now appear in various shades of grey. Previously, main roads had appeared in yellow, small streets in white and underground tunnels were only outlines. Parks and bush areas are a different shade of green. Bodies of water are a different shade of blue. The built up areas are all white. The routes and your timeline have also gone a jarring darker blue.
It just doesn’t look like Google Maps any more. The old colours were a closer matchto Google colours. It looks cheap and nasty now.
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They have been trialling this on and off for the past month and a half.
Looks unappealing but could be used to in some time.
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