Telstra to throw $50 million into fixing its network disruption problems

Telstra to throw $50 million into fixing its network disruption problems

Possibly in an effort to avoid more free data days, Telstra will throw an additional $50 million at repairs of its network after a series of disruptions wreaked havoc across Australia over the last few months.

Announced after the conclusion of a network review, Telstra’s Chief Operations Officer Kate McKenzie revealed that three key outcomes were identified that should put an end to the disruptions.

“The first outcome is that we have confirmed the root causes of those disruptions and implemented a range of steps to significantly reduce the likelihood of these issues happening again,” said McKenzie, who explained that the steps involved increasing redundancy in the nodes, adding more capacity to the core network, improving resilience in Telstra’s international connectivity and more.

Speaking on the second outcome, McKenzie explained that Telstra would be increasing investment in its monitoring and tools.“We are going to make even further investments in this area to take advantage of some of the most cutting edge technology becoming available,” said McKenzie, elaborating that around $25 million would be going towards these monitoring tools.

Finally, the remainder of the money will go towards improving Telstra’s recovery time for customers, with McKenzie stating that while outages may occur in the future, “a much larger number of customers will be able to re-register at the same time so any disruption to services will be of a much shorter duration.”

Stephen Lambrechts
Senior Journalist, Phones and Entertainment

Stephen primarily covers phones and entertainment for TechRadar's Australian team, and has written professionally across the categories of tech, film, television and gaming in both print and online for over a decade. He's obsessed with smartphones, televisions, consoles and gaming PCs, and has a deep-seated desire to consume all forms of media at the highest quality possible. 

He's also likely to talk a person’s ear off at the mere mention of Android, cats, retro sneaker releases, travelling and physical media, such as vinyl and boutique Blu-ray releases. Right now, he's most excited about QD-OLED technology, The Batman and Hellblade 2: Senua's Saga.