Telephone & Data Outage Wallan Area 27-28 March 2011

I contacted the Area General Manager for Telstra, Robert Bell, after we had this major Phone & Data Network Outage in the Wallan area.

His reply is shown below with my Questions in Bold (original letter scanned as PDF).

Unfortunately we can have this sort of thing happening, be it very rare. With the mobile as well as the land lines down it just shows how difficult it would of been for anyone with a medical condition at home alone to call for help or domestic fire! For those of us who live in the out lying areas, for fire or medical we had no easy way of calling for help. No point of going to neighbours thinking it was just your home effected. I think this needs to be discussed at the UPCAG meeting to see what suggestion of how to cover this situation should it happen again.

Tony (Editor)

—————————Letter Below—————-[couple of minor typo’s corrected]———-

Date 12 Apr 2011
Mr Tony Wakefield
UPPER PLENTY VIC 3756

Dear TONY

Re : Network Outage Sunday March 27th
Thank you for your email dated 4 April 2011 in relation to an outage that effected Telstra
services in the Wallan area. You raised 4 points that you have asked Telstra to respond to I
will address each of these individually.

1) I would like an explanation of what happened and what is being done to come up with a
solution to avoid the whole (appeared to be) of the Wallan exchange & RIMs being out of
service leaving us without any means of communication.

The outage at Wallan occurred on Sunday 27th March from 9:12pm resulting from damage
to the fibre affecting ADSL, PSTN, ISDN, IPMAN, 3G & 2G Mobiles at HIDDEN VALLEY, 3G
Mobiles at WANDONG SOUTH and Payphones. The damage was caused by excavation work
by Yarra Valley Water.
Work followed shortly with the replacement of 300 metres of optic fibre cable to be hauled
and spliced to restore network services. The fibre repair team worked continuously until full
restoration occurred at 5:12pm on Monday 28th March.
Telstra takes every opportunity to promote Dial Before You Dig to prevent damage to our
underground cable network.

2) As webmaster of the Upper Plenty Community website I would like your reply to be on a format to be made public to our community.

You may choose to post this letter.

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3) If technically you cannot come up with a solution to give us emergency 000 if a similar fault
occurs. Then it is obvious that we need some form of community communications in this
situation such as Radio (CB or Ham radio). Your input requested.

In terms of access to 000, Telstra at all times endeavours to maintain it services that enables
communication however Accidents/Faults do occur. There is no 100 per cent solution
should you choose CB radio or in fact a Satellite telephone.

4) In future inform ABC 774 of this sort of situation with expected return of service.

Telstra’s Public Affairs spokesperson was across this outage and provided an update to a
print media journalist from the local area.
If this outage occurred during a time of high bushfire risk, we would have communicated
through the Incident Control Centres.
I hope the above answers you queries should you wish to discuss further please call on the
below number.

Sincerely

Robert Bell
Area General Manager
Northern Victoria
Telstra Country Wide
Robert.bell (at) team.telstra
Phone : 03 5832 4013