Telstra and Optus experienced some outages due to ongoing bushfires in Victoria, but Australia’s three big telcos say their networks are mostly standing up to the flames.
“Telstra’s infrastructure held up reasonably well given the extent of the Victorian fires,” a Telstra spokesman said.
Telstra reported an outage today at a 3G base station at Warragul South, as well as 101 public switched telephone network (PSTN) and 52 ADSL services unavailable at Mickleham.
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Yesterday, Telstra said it experienced outages at mobile base stations in Neerim North and Gisborne as a result of power outages in the area. The same power outage took out 140 fixed broadband services in Gisborne.
Both outages lasted about 3.5 hours, with service restored by 7 pm last night, Telstra said.
In addition, Telstra said a high volume of calls caused mobile congestion in the Buchan and Tyers area yesterday afternoon and into the evening. To manage the situation, Telstra said it prioritised voice calls over data sessions.
Optus experienced an outage yesterday afternoon in the Sunbury area for about an hour due to a power failure, an Optus spokesperson said.
However, power was restored and now the Optus network is up and running in all bushfire-affected areas of Victoria, the spokesperson said.
“We are keeping a close eye on network infrastructure and performance in the region and are ready to respond should the situation change.”
Vodafone Hutchison Australia has seen no impact from the fire, a Vodafone spokeswoman said.
“We are continuing to closely monitor the situation,” she said.
Adam Bender covers telco and enterprise tech issues for Computerworld and is the author of a dystopian novel about surveillance. Follow him on Twitter: @WatchAdam
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