Telecom's XT Network down

Posted by Richard Thomas on 24 January 2010 | 0 Comments

Tags: Telecom, XT Network, XT, CDMA, outage

As of this moment (Sunday 24 Jan 2010) Telecom's XT network has been down for me for over 24 hours. Whenever people in my household try to use it we get a "Network Busy" error. I dion't know how far the outage extends. As I haven't heard anything about it the outage could be quite localised.

Part of my work involves ensuring a remote site monitoring system (commonly known as telemetry) is up and running. The telemetry system is required to be available 24 hours a day as it monitors water and sewage flows in pump stations. Without it contractors are required to drive many kilometres all over the district to manually check each station. This is a huge inefficiency, wasting both time and money.

Each morning the contractors get a test report. If they don't get the report they contact me via cellphone and I login to the system and find out why it isn't working as it should and fix the problem. Yesterday morning the system didn't send out the test report and so the contractors rang me to let me know. As the contractor is on Telecom's CDMA network they could make calls just fine.I didn't answer my phone (because it never rang) so they left a voice message and assumed that I would act on it when I retrieved it.

Purely by coincidence around the same time I was working on a related network and realised there was a problem with the telemetry system and so fixed it. If it wasn't for this fortuitous coincidence, the contractor would have had to start driving around doing checks until someone found another way to contact me.

So there were two problems here. 1) The XT network was down and 2) The contractor, being on a different network, thought I had been informed. Obviously we need to look at this and have a backup contact system. If I don't answer my cell phone, fall back to Plan B.