Contractors who cut a cable in inner suburban Sydney, NSW, recently knocked out internet connections for more than 4500 Victorian rural and regional customers, on the Activ8me network.
The network was down for nearly 24 hours, on May 19, after a thrust borer – doing work for TransGrid, damaged the cable, used in the provision of Activ8me’s Skymuster satellite service.
Activ8me chief executive Martin Camilleri wrote to customers, personally apologising for “yet another outage.”
“The most recent outage was another router issue, affecting Transgrid, who provide Activ8me with the link between our data centres and nbn,” Mr Camilleri said.
“Although this issue is out of our control, we value our customer service too much to be able to sit back and leave it unaddressed.”
Activ8me had 31,072 satellite customers, with 4650 in Victoria.
Compensation offered:
Mr Camilleri said Activ8me was offering customers additional gigabytes of peak data, to compensate them for the inconvenience.
Mr Camilleri said Active8me was dependent on other, third-party suppliers, to provide its internet service.
“But if any of those go down, we are still accountable and responsible for that
“We take full ownership of that and to work with our supplier partners,” Mr Camilleri said.
He said Active8me was setting up a back up link, to ensure customers remained connected.
“This is considered one of the highest priorities we are working on, because of the detrimental effect of outages on our customers.”
Mr Camilleri said Activ8me had been in extensive talks with TransGrid, “because of the frustration we experienced.
“They’ve given us a level of assurance that, in coming months, these problems will not reoccur.”
Damaged cable:
An Activ8me spokesman said the thrust borer – which was placing a one-metre diameter stormwater pipe underground - damaged fibre cable at Alexandria, NSW
The borer caused sustained damage to a critical cable, which was jammed inside its casing.
The spokesman said outage lasted nearly 20 hours, as 385 metres of cable had to be replaced.
Mr Camilleri said the borer caused extensive damage to the cable.
“They had to reconnect every strand of it and that’s an extremely time-consuming exercise,” Mr Camilleri said.
Affected producers:
Seymour sheep producer Brian Leahy, said he had been using the internet in drumming up support for the O’Sullivans Central Victorian Yard Dog Championship at this years Australian Sheep and Wool Show.
He said the outages had affected him but he wasn’t too concerned.
“I’m not used to having great phone reception and internet coverage anyway,” Mr Leahy said.
I’m not used to having great phone reception and internet coverage anyway
- Brian Leahy, Seymour sheep producer
‘So if it only goes out for a few hours, I think I’m on a great thing,” Mr Leahy said.
“We’ve been putting up with this sort of thing, for years.
He said Activ8me had gone down three times recently.
‘But if it goes down, we go and do something else – it’s not a big issue, because we are used to it.”
He acknowledged he didn’t rely on the internet to make his living but it was hard for those running a business.
Business effects:
Carpendeit dairy farmer Donna Edge said there had been three outages in three weeks, the longest being the one on May 19.
“It has been out from maybe five hours to 18 hours,” Ms Edge said.
“I don’t have great phone service, that’s why we have the satellite for our internet.
She said the most recent outages occurred as she was planning to do her farm accounts.
“Most of the programs I use to run my farm business are cloud, or internet, based.”
Ms Edge said she was also unable to do any work for her social media business, “unless I went a couple of kilometres up the road to get a decent phone service.”
The Active8me service “has been quite good, up until the last few weeks.”
Transgrid apology:
A TransGrid spokesperson said a “temporary” outage affected Skymuster customers, on May 19.
“TransGrid staff investigated the failure and restored the service as soon as practicable,” the spokesman said.
“An investigation into the equipment fault is currently being undertaken by the manufacturer.
“TransGrid is committed to providing a secure and reliable service to its customers, and apologises for any inconvenience the outage caused.”
Outage explained:
- Internet Service Providers (ISPs), such as Activ8me connect to the National Broadband Network (NBN) via designated Points of Interconnect (PoI) around Australia.
- Connecting to each PoI requires mid-to-long distance fibre optic cables.
- This physical connection between the NBN and ISP is known as backhaul.
- ISPs rely on telecommunications carriers to provide this backhaul.
- For Sky Muster, Activ8me uses TransGrid's backhaul services to connect its infrastructure to the NBN.
- TransGrid leases dedicated service through its fibre optic cable so Activ8me can physically connect from its data centre in Mascot, Sydney to NBN's data centre in Eastern Creek.
