Telstra under fire over response to Tassie outage

Managing director Simon Hackett was scathing of the incumbent telco after it took nine hours to dispatch a technician to fix the backhaul link between Internode's Hobart point-of-presence (PoP) and the mainland.

"With the offensively large amount of money we pay for the existing Telstra circuit, there should have been a technician dispatched the minute the circuit went down," Hackett said in an email to iTnews.

"Not nine hours later. And not based on any contractually specified restoration times, but just because that offensively expensive service should at least be fixed really quickly when it breaks. And it wasn't."

Internode issued a service advisory just after 10.00pm on Monday evening stating that its Hobart PoP was offline.

At the time, Internode said it had informed its backhaul provider - Telstra - of the problem.

However, it was not until 8.45am today that the ISP was able to let customers know a Telstra technician was on-site.

The problem was fixed an hour-and-a-half later.

A post-incident report is yet to be released, but late today a Telstra spokesperson confirmed Internode's version of events.

"We are investigating why this happened and we will be communicating with Internode about it as quickly as possible," the Telstra spokesperson said.

Earlier, a spokesperson for the carrier had been unable to shed any light on the issue. The outage also did not show up on Telstra Wholesale's own network status page.

Internode recently announced it will scale back its use of Telstra's backhaul cable in favour of using Basslink, which is due to go live sometime before June.

The ISP will retain around 25 per cent of current capacity on the Telstra link for its own redundancy and to run out-of-band network management for Basslink, iTnews revealed earlier this month.

It seems the Basslink go-live date can't come soon enough for customers that rely on Telstra's single data path between Tasmania and Melbourne.

"What this outage does illustrate is the obvious merit of Internode being the first signed-up customer of Basslink," Hackett said.

"We look forward to running two distinct data links (via Telstra and Basslink) to service our valued Tasmanian customers, just as soon as we can turn that second path on."