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Telstra enterprise outage caused by faulty hardware

Services for enterprise customers in NSW have been restored by Telstra, with the outage attributed to a faulty piece of hardware.
Written by Corinne Reichert, Contributor

Telstra has confirmed that its enterprise voice and data outage across New South Wales was caused by a faulty piece of hardware.

The outage affected only enterprise customers on Tuesday morning until 1pm AEDT, with consumer fixed-line and mobile services not impacted by the hours-long outage.

Earlier this month, Telstra also experienced an outage across fixed-line and mobile services due to a fire at its Chatswood exchange which then caused customers' SMS messages to be delivered to the wrong people.

"As a result of the Chatswood exchange fire today, it's possible some SMS messages have been incorrectly delivered," a Telstra spokesperson said at the time.

The issue follows seven outages on the Telstra network during the first half of 2016: The first almost a year ago, on February 22, which affected prepaid and post-paid mobile services and was caused by "embarrassing human error"; the second on March 17, which involved an hours-long national mobile data and voice outage; and the third on March 22, which was a smaller voice outage.

It then experienced an NBN and ADSL outage in May that resulted in the telco having to send free modems to customers still affected several days later; a mobile data services outage later that week; a broadband service outage in June; and an outage that took down businesses across Victoria, including banks, hospitals, department stores, and Jetstar.

As a result of last year's outages, Telstra CEO Andrew Penn in June committed the telco to investing an additional AU$250 million in its network over the next six to 12 months in three major areas: AU$50 million to be spent on improving mobile network resiliency by creating better real-time monitoring and speeding up recovery time; AU$100 million on increasing the core fixed-line network's reliability and resiliency; and AU$100 million on upping its ADSL broadband capacity to cope with demand.

However, during Telstra's financial results presentation last week, Penn revealed that the telecommunications provider's net promoter score (NPS) was down by eight points year on year due to "the impact of the network disruptions on our customers".

Telstra reported a FY17 first-half net profit of AU$1.8 billion, down 11.8 percent, and earnings before interest, tax, depreciation, and amortisation (EBITDA) of AU$5.2 billion -- down 1.6 percent year on year due to "intense competition" as well as the impacts of regulatory decisions -- on revenue of AU$12.8 billion, down 6.4 percent.

Despite both the outages and the drops across revenue and earnings, Telstra made gains in customers across mobile and fixed during the six months to December 31.

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