Telstra offers free data day to compensate customers for outage

The mobile network of Telstra, which recently experienced network problems, was tested again yesterday as customers used a free data day - offered as compensation - to download and stream at record rates.

Customers downloaded 2,686 terabytes of data which worked out to 3.4 million HD movies - up 46 per cent from 1,841 terabytes downloaded on a previous free data day offered on 14 February.

Telstra, with 16.9 million mobile customers, had given away free unlimited data on the occasion as apologies for recent major mobile network outages.

The carrier's reputation as Australia's premier telco, took a beating from three major network problems in the past two months.

A major nation-wide network outage hit the company on 9 February, followed by another major outage on 17 March which left around half of its 16 million mobile customers unable to make calls or go online.

In a third incident which occurred at the start of March, 500,000 of its pre-paid customers were affected.

Some customers yesterday complained via social media about slow download speeds and Telstra conceded there were "a few hot spots where heavy users caused localised congestion."

Chief operations officer Kate McKenzie said at a media briefing yesterday that the network had performed well in view of the load.

"We were really pleased with the way the network performed given this absolute tsunami of data," McKenzie said.

Meanwhile, Telstra has provided an update on the network engineering review into its three national outages this year, with plans to boost the capacity of its signalling channels, add extra traffic management protection, improve capacity for its home location register, and heighten its "awareness plan".

McKenzie said Telstra was seeking the advice of both internal and external engineering experts, including from Cisco, Ericsson, and Juniper.

"Our initial review has confirmed the recent incidents were not related, although two of the disruptions were due to delays in processing the registration of mobile devices ... we are absolutely committed to getting to the bottom of these incidents, and are taking all of the necessary steps to minimise the risk of it happening again," McKenzie said at the CommsDay Summit in Sydney on Monday morning.

"We are well into a thorough review of the network. I am leading this review, and it involves our own specialist teams as well as external experts from around the world. We have already progressed short- and medium-term actions to improve resilience and robustness in the mobile network.''