Cairns business and residents were left in communications darkness yesterday after a core router failure in a Townsville exchange knocked services off the air from Townsville to the Torres Strait.
The outage that started at around 12 noon effected all Telstra internet and Telstra Wholesale customers on multiple exchanges across the Far North and also effected Telstra's NextG network. Systems were fully restored by 3.30pm.
Wally Donaldson, manager for Telstra Country Wide in Cairns said "Obviously, it’s a priority to get this restored for us and it’s certainly been treated as a major incident, priority one."
An unprecedented incident like this was very serious and showed just how vulnerable we are here in Cairns to communications failure. What the outage highlighted is that there is no redundancy from Townsville to Cairns. So if the core routers fail in Townsville it essentially cuts communications to the rest of Far North Queensland.
The question should be asked, why is there not a redundant link from Townsville? Obviously Telstra doesn't see Cairns as a big enough market to warrant that investment, but if the 3 hours of downtime yesterday is anything to go by, with businesses unable to perform transactions, then surely that is a big enough reason to get a second link to Cairns.
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