Meanwhile, back at the Ranch: The guidance of the headless Chooks: Prevails.

"When an ABC journo asks a question that makes sense, it'll catch anyone off guard."

That has to be an award winner, absolutely made my day, still laughing as I type.

QUOTE: Cloudflare, which tracks a range of activity on the internet, noticed a spike in Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) announcements from the telco coinciding with the time Optus’s network went offline.

BGP effectively acts as a roadmap for the internet, and the announcements tell the rest of the internet the easiest way to a particular location.

Matt Tett, managing director of network analysis company Enex TestLab, told Guardian Australia that while he was not certain of the cause, Optus appears to have had some failure in routeing at 4am that caused an exponential increase in BGP announcements.

Optus has decided to offer all its punters 200GB of free data as compensation for the outage yesterday. It wouldn't be bad except for the fact that a large number of their customers are either on unlimited downloads or seldom use the Internet and mainly have their NBN connection just for a landline phone.

It demonstrates a lack of awareness to its customers' needs. A lot of people will walk away as a result and Optus can only blame themselves.

Optus CEO is being severely criticised for her lack of communication during the outage.

She should have walked down to the nearest public phone ... free courtesy of Telstra.

Did love a comment on ABC this morning: Could not understand why people did not want to move ISP: Err! probably because they're worse than the one they have....Simples

Optus say it was a software upgrade gone wrong. Still don't know why their famous redundancy didn't work.

While we are moaning about communications, I notice NBN's latest prices (from Dec 1) are reduced. For example the 25down/5up will be reduced by $11 to $26 wholesale. How is it then, that the major players charge $85, when they don't really have to lift a finger?

https://www.nbnco.com.au/corporate-information/media-centre/media-statements/statement-on-nbn-wholesale-prices

Well, the truth finally emerges and it's an own goal:

QUOTE:
The unnamed “international peering network” that Optus said had contributed to its 16-hour-long network meltdown last week was its Singaporean parent company Singtel, it can be revealed.

The embarrassing revelation comes as it can also be revealed a key executive, who left Canadian telco Rogers Communications less than two weeks after it last year suffered an almost identical outage to Optus, is now working for Singtel.

. . .

Despite the Singtel Internet Exchange being one of the triggers for the outage, an Optus source said the Australian telco was primarily responsible for the outage.

“It’s still Optus’ fault when it comes to its own network (unless Singtel required Optus to accept routes blindly),” an Optus engineer, who was unclear what commercial agreements may have been in place, said.

The source, as well as other external network engineers this masthead spoke to, said Optus should have had filtering rules in place that dismissed or ignored the update from the Singtel exchange.

Optus CEO resigns over the outage.... I imagine she will get a nice golden handshake followed by a new cushy job somewhere else.

QUOTE: I imagine she will get a nice golden handshake followed by a new cushy job somewhere else.

Now be reasonable: Anyone that can mess up like that would be a front runner into the bureaucracy here: She would fit in nicely. They can't introduce anything that works.