I'm just astounded that there's a single point of failure for all mobile and Internet customers...
this post was submitted on 07 Nov 2023
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And that there is so much government infrastructure that relies on a consumer-based, foreign owned commercial company.
Why aren’t all these things hard-wired.
Optus has now confirmed triple-0 calls will not work from an Optus landline.
How can you fuck up designing your system this badly?
Huge number of landlines now go through SIP tunnels over the NBN.. so if your internet is down, no phone calls, not even emergency unless you have purposefully designed your network with failover to another provider. the few remaining physical landline connections become data at some point now too, so if that backend goes down, not even the emergency calls will go through.
Many of the consumer routers supplied by the ISPs now have failover to a 4g/5g connection, but it's always the same network of course, so the failover is useless unless there's some actual work done by the providers in allowing emergency failover to their competitors.
Yeah, I did think about this more and realised it was NBN-based. But that’s kind of worse, at least on the NBNs part. Their systems would have noticed pretty quickly that they weren’t getting any traffic from Optus anymore. There’s no technical barrier that would stop them from being able to provide a failover endpoint to route outgoing emergency calls. Instead though, they spent how many millions on the bullshit backup batteries in fibre installs on the pretence that would help with emergency calls. All those batteries that die after 2 years, then the modem helpfully screeching regularly to let you know. Even if they spent all that money for a backup that only gets used on days like today, it would still have been more worthwhile.
Many of the consumer routers supplied by the ISPs now have failover to a 4g/5g connection, but it's always the same network of course, so the failover is useless unless there's some actual work done by the providers in allowing emergency failover to their competitors.
You’re completely talking out of your arse here though. That’s not how GSM networks or devices work at all. Optus mobile customers were still able to make 000 calls through competing operators. That is an international standard for GSM, and has been since the days of 2G. You can travel to ~80% of the world with your aussie mobile, dial 000 (yes, even in the US. yes, 911 works on an aussie mobile in Australia too) and if there’s a local operators signal, it will go through. You don’t even need to have a SIM card. There are provisions for data-only devices, but those routers can do calls over the 4G backup. If the device supports phone calls at all, it needs to support emergency calls through all available carriers to be compliant.
Yes but a landline call, made over a 5g modem connection is not a GSM phone call, it is a sip data call that gets separated out to the emergency system at the isps end, its a higher priority stream than data, but its still data. They didn't work.
They could have made the modems use GSM phone routing for emergency calls, but they don't. It's all sip data.
wait so who won?
SIP is exactly how 4G & 5G calls work already. It is perfectly technically feasible. Whether or not the 3GPP standard covers routers with backup data connections or not is a different question. But the router could, and should, be designed to recognise the number you are dialling is an emergency call and still route it via another carrier’s network. I was also responding to the other person saying it was a competition issue, but other carrier’s are mandated by law in Australia to take those calls.
Like, this was a solved problem literally decades ago. You could plug a phone into the jack and call 000 even if there was no service to the address. It is bloody shameful that this could have occurred in this day and age. There are plenty of rural places without any cell service where people rely on landlines in emergencies. The ACCC should come down hard on them, doubly so if it’s found out that anyone died as a result of the outage.
Thanks mate that's a much better link, edited the post
No probs; gotta support our ABC!
Whirlpool sometimes has leaked technical information about outages or other insights: https://forums.whirlpool.net.au/thread/96n1w7m9
EDIT: Gough Lui (Gogli?) is also doing some detailed meta-coverage on his blog https://goughlui.com/2023/11/08/breaking-optus-nationwide-outage-08-11-2023/
What a disaster of a company, not sure why anyone would stay with Optus after the last year. I'm sure they will continue to advertise very heavily like they didn't after their security failure last time
Optus is pretty much the only mobile provider that's viable at my place. Telstra barely gets me one bar of coverage and mobile data speeds of less than 1Mbit/s. I don't trust Vodafone's coverage map as far as I can spit against the wind, but the one time I tried Vodafone out here it was useless.
So yeah, why would anyone stay with Optus? Show me a viable alternative and I'm gone.
Unfortunately I suspect Telstra is simply "there but for the geace of god go I".
I miss Telecom.
The facts here are that the core mobile infrastructure, the core broadband infrastructure and the core landline infrastructure are all down.
This doesn't feel like a "whoops, misconfigured a route".
This feels like a coordinated attack against multiple (theoretically) separate systems.
That's a very generous and optimistic view of Optus' processes and infrastructure dependencies. I'm unsure why you would assume they're in any way robust, especially considering Optus' history.