During March Tasmania’s telecommunication vulnerability was exposed. Widespread outages impacted business and domestic users of Tasmanian mobile and terrestrial telecommunications networks for over 5 hours. Services offline included TV channels, banking services, booking systems, point of sale systems and many other services relying on cloud or IT infrastructure located in mainland or global locations. In what was described as a perfect storm both Telstra optic fibre cables between Tasmania and Victoria were cut almost simultaneously by separate events in Frankston Victoria and Northwest Tasmania.
Tasmania is connected by three subsea optic fibre cables operated by two cable operators. Telstra operate two cables and Basslink operate a single cable. The following day during unrelated circumstances the Basslink fibre was also cut in Victoria resulting in approximately a 20 Hour outage to Tasmanian customers.
These unfortunate events highlight the need for businesses and communities in regional Australian locations to understand the limitations of their service providers when establishing telecommunications services. Redundancy generally comes in three ways; telecommunications via optic fibre cable or microwave radio infrastructure, networking and IT infrastructure, and carrier diversity (multiple service providers using diverse cable and networking infrastructure)
Prior to the recent outage, the majority of Tasmanian business felt confident in their redundancy due to having cable and networking infrastructure diversity however most didn’t have carrier diversity. 42-24 is a supplier of critical services within Tasmania. We have invested in a resilient network design that utilises all redundancy options available in Tasmania.
We have capacity on all three cables connecting Tasmania to mainland Australia and a diverse state-wide fibre network. During the March outage 42-24 customers maintained service. We ensure business continuity to our customers, and our network is a trusted foundation for organisations looking to execute their hybrid cloud strategy. Connect with us; contact one of our BDM’s here today.