A recent 6 hour police emergency call centre outage was met with fierce criticism from some quarters, with critics saying that the multimillion-rand investment should have prevented such an incident. Some people partly blamed Telkom for the outage, but according to the company a building contractor was really the guilty party.<\/p>\n
“Telkom lost signaling on 3 transmission links in its Erand Exchange area when the fibre optic break occurred. An overhead optic fibre cable in the Erand Exchange Area was damaged by a building contractor's grader, causing the cable to sag and hooked onto a passing truck,” said Nabintu Petsana, Telkom’s Acting Group Executive for Corporate Communication.<\/p>\n
One of the affected links directly impacted 9 of the 12 ISDN Primary Rate systems which provide services to the Midrand 10111 centre. <\/p>\n
“The Company's Network Operations Centre (NOC) personnel, in their endeavour to minimise the effect of the service interruption, restricted downtime on the damaged SAPS links to 8 hours and 18 minutes. This was done by temporarily diverting traffic while on-site technical personnel continued repairing the fibre break,” said Petsana.<\/p>\n
Telkom said that the damaged optic fibre links were out of service for a total 18 hours and 8 minutes from 16:12 on Friday 4 April 2008 to 10:20 the next morning. <\/p>\n
“Given the urgency of the situation, technical personnel worked throughout the night in order to carry out the repair as quickly as possible,” Petsana concluded.<\/p>\n