Contractor Cuts off 1 Million Optus Customers

By Greg McNevin

July 17, 2008: In a one-in-a-million event, Optus has been put in a very tough spot when a contractor in south-east Queensland accidentally cut a fibre optic cable, disconnecting upwards of a million of the telco’s subscribers and disrupting communications at Brisbane Airport, hospitals, emergency services, banks and more.

The problem began just before 8am AEST, and for most it continued until the afternoon when service was restored after an attempt to reroute traffic through a backup network failed.

The issue has immediately raised questions around why services were not able to be switched to alternative carriers during the outage.

“Switching to another carrier would seem like a no-brainer to me,” said Cairns Chamber of Commerce president Jeremy Blockey according to theage.com.au. “Airlines do it when they cancel flights and I don't see why communications providers couldn't do the same.”

Optus director of government and corporate affairs Maha Krishnapillai on the other hand noted that the outage was a “one-in-a-million” event and could not have been foreseen in planning.

“We can't design a network or build a network on those one in a million chances,” said Krishnapillai.

While that may not be such an easy task, Optus has signalled that it is willing to compensate its customers for downtime.

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