Steve Wray wrote:
Redundancy isn't really what I mean; more forward-thinking.
So if a TelstraClear engineer thought about it really hard the truck would have missed the fibre? Personally, I don't think the power of prayer is a valid network protection scheme. Though when I used to work there, it was useful on occassion ;)
From what I've heard out of Telstra people -- and thats just the faults and 'helpdesk' people, the attitude seems to be that a 'truck hitting a pole' is not something that could have been foreseen and that therefore there was no point in having a contingency plan to deal with it.
To me, this just seems wrong-headed.
My question for Telstra is, was there a plan? How well did it work out? If they didn't have a plan or if it didn't work out well, how are they going to address this in future? And the answers I've been getting back from Telstra people are rather disconcerting.
A quick talk about how things are done in a Telco may be in order. 1. You need money to do everything. This includes laying fibre, writing plans and taking a toilet break. 2. There are two types of money to be spent - OPEX and CAPEX (OPerational expenditure and CAPital expenditure). 3. OPEX is evil. Accountants see it as a black hole that money is thrown down. It is not an investment. It is paying some guy for something you already own. OPEX is constantly cut. Many things that should be done as OPEX are classed as CAPEX by squinting your eyes and with the aid of smoke and mirrors. 4. CAPEX is ok - it is investing money in something with the expectation of a return at some point in time. Dig a hole, lay a cable, charge people to use it, eventually they've paid you more than it cost you to lay - this is CAPEX. You need a business case to spend CAPEX. This will consist of all likely and unlikely costs and revenues; and consequently a best, worst and expected-case return on investment. If the company thinks this is the best way to spend it's money it will do it. If it thinks it can make a larger profit or the same profit in a shorter time frame elsewhere it will do that. This is The Way It Works(tm) for a Telco and most businesses. If you can write a business case showing that getting 1000 monks in Tibet to pray for the safety of TelstrClear's network will turn a profit then they will do it. If prayer wasn't what you meant by "forward-thinking", and redundancy wasn't it then I'm at a loss. What else could they do? Not lay the fibre there? That location was probably the place that brought the best return on investment to justify the CAPEX. Could there have been a better place to put it - probably. Do companies have the time to second guess every decision made? Or will someone else beat you to the punch if you do that? Sorry for the massive rant, but berating a company, any company, for doing their best to fix a fault caused by some truck driver who was likely high on P at the time just seems like cynical people trying to complain about nothing to me. Sure, if you were one of the people affected it must've really sucked. In the end them's the breaks. On a lighter note, Merry Christmas to everyone - try to shake off the cynicism and anger that accumulated through the year at the beach this summer! Jonathan