Dial Before You Dig

Some of you may have seen on the news that Optus services in QLD and northern NSW had gone down for several hours today... due to someone digging to lay down a desalination pipe near Gold Coast. AFAIK, one shouldn't be ploughing fields laced with fibre... Whoopsy~

The unfortunate thing is that we had already been brought down to using the backup, as the main pipe was suffering from a hardware problem. So all those redundancy plans certainly did nothing to prevent Queensland from being cut off from the rest of the world.

Services affected included internet, landline and mobile phones, not only for Optus but also other companies that used Optus infrastructure, such as iiNet internet, 3 mobile and Virgin mobile.

Anyhoo, internet's back up - somebody should tell those Gold Coasters that just because they're so close to the border, they shouldn't act as if they left half their brain across the border at home...