Russell Fulton wrote:
What amazes me is that Telstra maintain that a truck hitting a pole was a *completely* unforseeable event and that even in retrospect they could not have been expected to have forseen that *one* *day* a truck would hit a 'single-point-of-failure pole' and that they could not have been expected to have planned for it.
I think that the question one must ask first is "Just how many such poles are there?" Probably thousands scattered around the country. Just the same as there are thousands of point where a backhoe can cut fiber and disrupt *local* networks. That is what the telcos mean when they say "that they could not have been expected to have planned for it".
"local networks" is inherently a relative term :) This one affected several suburbs.
It has been repeated pointed out in this discussion that residential subscribers do not pay for redundancy. At work we have two connections
Redundancy isn't really what I mean; more forward-thinking. 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.