Optus mobile services are down across the country, affecting millions of Australian customers and businesses.
The outage was first reported at around 4am AEDT, with Optus customers across the country taking to social media to find out what was happening.
Mobile phones are unable to make and receive calls and mobile internet services are also down.
Yeah, I did think about this more and realised it was NBN-based. But that’s kind of worse, at least on the NBNs part. Their systems would have noticed pretty quickly that they weren’t getting any traffic from Optus anymore. There’s no technical barrier that would stop them from being able to provide a failover endpoint to route outgoing emergency calls. Instead though, they spent how many millions on the bullshit backup batteries in fibre installs on the pretence that would help with emergency calls. All those batteries that die after 2 years, then the modem helpfully screeching regularly to let you know. Even if they spent all that money for a backup that only gets used on days like today, it would still have been more worthwhile.
You’re completely talking out of your arse here though. That’s not how GSM networks or devices work at all. Optus mobile customers were still able to make 000 calls through competing operators. That is an international standard for GSM, and has been since the days of 2G. You can travel to ~80% of the world with your aussie mobile, dial 000 (yes, even in the US. yes, 911 works on an aussie mobile in Australia too) and if there’s a local operators signal, it will go through. You don’t even need to have a SIM card. There are provisions for data-only devices, but those routers can do calls over the 4G backup. If the device supports phone calls at all, it needs to support emergency calls through all available carriers to be compliant.
Yes but a landline call, made over a 5g modem connection is not a GSM phone call, it is a sip data call that gets separated out to the emergency system at the isps end, its a higher priority stream than data, but its still data. They didn’t work.
They could have made the modems use GSM phone routing for emergency calls, but they don’t. It’s all sip data.
wait so who won?
SIP is exactly how 4G & 5G calls work already. It is perfectly technically feasible. Whether or not the 3GPP standard covers routers with backup data connections or not is a different question. But the router could, and should, be designed to recognise the number you are dialling is an emergency call and still route it via another carrier’s network. I was also responding to the other person saying it was a competition issue, but other carrier’s are mandated by law in Australia to take those calls.
Like, this was a solved problem literally decades ago. You could plug a phone into the jack and call 000 even if there was no service to the address. It is bloody shameful that this could have occurred in this day and age. There are plenty of rural places without any cell service where people rely on landlines in emergencies. The ACCC should come down hard on them, doubly so if it’s found out that anyone died as a result of the outage.