Telstra suffered a taste of Optus' woes last week as an upgrade for its Next G mobile network went awry, cutting customers' speeds back.
(Credit: Telstra)
One customer said he was experiencing speeds of 794Kbps when he normally was able to achieve 2,500Kbps. Others dropped further to 25Kbps.
The customers affected were in "a small number of locations" in Queensland, according to Telstra. The affected users, who posted their problems on broadband forum Whirlpool, thought their connections had been ruined by Queensland's recent storms. However, it was not the storms which caused the problem, according to a Telstra spokesperson, but instead a software glitch.
"As a consequence of a planned software upgrade to the Next G network, an unexpected fault adversely impacted data speeds at a small number of locations in Queensland last week," they said.
Telstra's "monitoring and performance management promptly identified and isolated this matter" leading to a correction being applied progressively to the network, the spokesperson continued, saying there were no further performance problems in the region which the telco knew of.
The telco did not say which upgrade caused the problem. It has recently activated technology to allow its network to carry speeds of up to 21Mbps.
Telstra's network glitch came after the telco launched a set of advertisements bagging the unreliability of its competitor's networks. The ads featured various situations in which a mobile has no coverage, causing its users inconvenience.
"If your network's letting you down, try the network that works better in more places," the advertisement said. The ads appear timed to capitalise on its main competitor Optus' recent spate of network incidents.
Graemlins can affect any company but this does reflect the policies of many where software upgrades are just rolled out willy-nilly without first rolling out to a test environment so that bugs can be found and squashed before customers are affected by them.