Thank you for your patience over the previous weeks whilst the unprecedented increases in demand on the Australian telecommunications network caused some, at times, significant hindrance. We are pleased to advise our upstream providers have now completed their extensive capacity upgrade works across all major call collection areas. As it currently stands, these upgrades have resolved the vast majority of congestion issues users were experiencing. Some further works will be undertaken over the coming months, but in the meantime your end user experience should be greatly improved.

Telecommunications Network Updates

Our upstream providers advise that their overall inbound call traffic has increased over 80% from baseline levels and that this is expected to continue building in volume throughout the remainder of this week as more businesses transition to remote worker solutions; obviously this will be further compounded by the announcement of early school closures/the commencement of term breaks.

Whilst thousands of additional channels were added between network carriers last week to reduce the industrywide congestion issues being experienced, these links remain strained due to the rapid scale of increasing traffic due to the impact of the COVID-19 coronavirus.

There are several localised exchange/area updates which are relevant to inform our clients of:

Melbourne: Windsor and Lonsdale Exchanges

Both of these exchanges have had physical works completed and are now awaiting the internal provisioning that will see their capacities increased. These works are presently being expedited, though as yet we have no final ETA.

Sydney Call Collection Area

A network capacity expansion scheduled for later this year has been brought forward, but unfortunately this upgrade is still in the planning and design phase. We therefore have no ETA on when the increases to capacity will flow through.

Launceston Call Collection Area

A further 250 channels have been added to provide additional capacity effective as of now.

Hobart Call Collection Area

Network capacity upgrades are scheduled to allow for an additional 520 channels; ETA on work completion is currently COB Wednesday (25/03).

Adelaide Call Collection Area

Additional capacity works are in early planning stages, thus ETA for completion still pending.

Further updates and advisements will be provided as soon as they come to hand.

We appreciate the ongoing patience of our clients experiencing the worst of these congestion issues. We remain committed to doing all that we can to maintain the pressure on upstream carriers re the timing of essential works and in continuing to provide real time data on any new concerns that arise.

An unprecedented influx of network traffic with all network carriers continue to affect both mobile to mobile and VoIP carriage calls due to the extremely high load strain being imposed over all global communication systems as a result of the COVID-19 outbreak.

The Australian Telecommunications industry is working hard to resolve these upstream congestion issues, with all wholesale carriers cooperating to redistribute traffic peaks across the network as a whole as quickly as is possible. This is happening in conjunction with works intended to expand the network carriage capacity going forward.

At this stage, such physical works as are necessarily involved in order to achieve this have been given an ETA of the end of next week. In the interim, we continue to route our own network traffic around these issues as much as possible. We appreciate your tolerance and patience in light of this extraordinary and unparalleled event. We will endeavour to provide further updates as soon as they become available.

Further changes to call traffic routing have been implemented to address the current high volume of call traffic.

We are continuing to monitor the situation.

Due to the recent adoption of work-from-home across many businesses in response to COVID-19, there is significant strain being placed on inter-carrier links and we are seeing a large amount of congestion based issues when making and receiving calls.

This is being investigated as a high priority. We will provide an additional update shortly.

We are noticing some inbound congestion issues with both Optus and Vodafone trunks, the issue is currently being investigated as high priority and we will provide an update as soon as we can.