Inquiry ordered after phone exchange blaze

Poor Telstra

A thunderstorm took out our (multiple neighbourhoods) Bigpond cable connectivity again on Tuesday night. The helldesk droid promised me an SMS when service is restored. Apologies for those who can't read this - I never got the SMS. I only bothered to report the (by then known) issue 11 hours after the lightning strike - there was no service outage details or fix ETA available from the Engineering division to the support group by even that time - so professional.

Do I not remember reading recently that Mr Conroy was also inquiring into the vast spend in the past of "gold plating" of Telstra's network to ridiculously high levels of fall-over protection?

What a useful response!

"Conroy announced that the inquiry, which will be conducted by his Department, will investigate the cause, extent of damage and what services were affected..."

1) An electrical fire in the exchange,

2) It destroyed the exchange,

3) Fixed line, mobile and internet services,

"...receive a report on the fire prevention and mitigation strategies in place and report on the process of restoration of services".

1) An expired CO2 extinguisher and fortnightly sacrifice of a minor mammal of the Order Rodentia.

2) >Section cut to boost flagging profit margins, corporate stock price and executive bonuses<

3) Yeah, yeah, when we're done. Now, either provide a fresh goat or f##k off and let us get on with it.

"It will also look into the effectiveness of disaster recovery and service continuity planning for telecommunications infrastructure and whether affected businesses also have appropriate continuity plans."

1) Where's the profit in thinking about what might happen in some future reality? Goats are cheap, and you can sue/claim against insurance to get back lost earnings.

"The Department will also hold a public forum on the community impact of this event."

Yes, that is exactly what a Minister should do because...

1) ...community talk-fests are renowned for their ability to solve problems and make the world better.

2) ...the best way to deal with anything Telstra related is to ask the opinion of Average Joe/Joan Public.

3) ...Ministers aren't employed to do anything, they are employed to take community surveys of citizen outrage, hold press conferences and pretend they understand what is happening.