The looming federal election could scupper plans to launch FttC upgrades to full fibre.
The company responsible for the National Broadband Network has detailed to Senate Estimates how 46,500 of its 112,000 satellite customer base were knocked offline, as well as how 600 of those customers remained offline for the next fortnight. Speaking on Tuesday night, NBN chief development officer for regional and remote Gavin Williams said the incident was not the company’s finest hour, but it was “unprecedented”. Williams said at 8:30pm on December 21, Sky Muster manager Optus informed NBN it had an “off-orbit condition of our second satellite,” due to a micrometeorite hitting it. “It effectively makes the satellite’s body rotate whilst it remains in its orbit. So the satellite is no longer pointing at the appropriate spot on earth. So the payload, the transmission system on that satellite, is effectively switched off for that period,” he said. Seven hours later, the satellite refound Earth and recovered, and service resumed for all but 573 customers. For them, the outage was just getting started. Williams said in that instance, the outage was due to missing parameters in a configuration file used in customer premises equipment. “It took quite a long time actually to delve into what was wrong and how you could recover,” he said. “In the meantime, we had a few theories, we were mobilising people off of annual leave to potentially do 600 truck rolls into the bush. Fortunately, we were able to recover with effectively manual intervention.” Although he could not say with total certainty, Williams said a load balancer is believed to be the root cause, and NBN is working with its suppliers to ensure it doesn’t happen again.
