Telstra to spend $250 million on improving its network

Telstra CEO Andrew Penn

Telstra’s CEO says the telco will spend $250 million on network improvements (a figure that includes $50 million the telco previously announced it would spend on improving its mobile network's resilience).

The pledge by chief executive Andrew Penn comes after a string of high-profiles outages of both mobile and fixed services.

Telstra will use the funds, taken from its existing capital program, to improve the reliability and resilience of its core network; improve the resilience of its mobile network, including improving recovery time and implementing real-time monitoring; and boost the capacity of its ADSL services.

In a blog entry Penn said that Telstra was “very advanced” in implementing the recommendations of a review of its mobile network.

That review was commissioned after a major mobile outage in February, which the telco blamed on human error, and a number of other mobile outages

In May, Telstra said that it would spend $50 million on measures to prevent a repeat of the problems that took down mobile services for a significant number of customers (that $50 million is included in the figure spruiked today by Penn). That money was set to be split 50:50 between investing in the network’s capacity to handle re-registration of devices and improving real-time monitoring.

“We have also recently completed an end-to-end review of our core network and IT systems, pinpointing sources of potential risk,” Penn wrote today.

“All network operators around the world face the risk of disruptions whether they be the consequence of weather, accidental damage, hardware or other failures,” the CEO wrote.

“What I am committed to though is continuing to invest in building the durability and capability of our network, and in our ability to respond quickly if things do go wrong to minimise the impact on customers. For example, changes already made mean that our recovery time on the mobile network has been substantially improved.”

Last year Penn said that Telstra would increase its total capex investments to 15 per cent of sales for the next two years, which would provide an additional $500 million for its mobile network.