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After last month’s telecommunications meltdown, Optus has leased additional back up capacity for its fibre optic link and has already begun compensation for businesses caught out by the fault.
After last month’s telecommunications meltdown, Optus has leased additional back up capacity for its fibre optic link and has already begun compensation for businesses caught out by the fault.
Whilst the network , can not offer compensation to all customers that were impacted by the outage, they are endeavouring to address the issues with any customers who have contacted them about issues.
Optus director of government and corporate affairs Maha Krishnapillai said: “There’s no way we can offer blanket compensation, in fact no telco will do that. All telcos have clauses in their customer contracts that say we can’t be held liable for consequential damages if communications networks go down. But we have asked our customers to contact us and work with their account managers if they have problems.”
So far only a very small number of customers have contacted Optus.
In these instances Optus was able to offer corporate customers compensation in the form of offsets for their communication bills.
The value of the compensation has not been disclosed.
The company is also rolling out a number of initiatives to make sure the problem does not occur again. If the existing network was to fail again the new extended capacity should enable calls to continue in Queensland – however interstate calls would still be in jeopardy.
Optus has also installed additional switching capacity and has launched a review into how the telco can quickly transport hardware backups to remote locations in the case of equipment failure.
Source:
Australian IT
