Dodo Says It's at Fault for Internet Outage

Internet service provider Dodo has confirmed it was responsible for the Internet outage which affected millions of Australians on Thursday. 

Dodo CEO Larry Kestelman released statement Friday noting that the outage that affected Telstra (News - Alert) customers was the result of a router hardware failure.

“What it looks like has happened … is a very minor hardware failure on one of the routers that has caused some big issues between ourselves and Telstra and had a flow on effect to others which it absolutely shouldn’t have,” Kestelman told The Advocate in an interview.

Yet what Kestelman considered a “very minor” hardware failure actually lasted nearly 45 minutes and according to The Advocate, affected customers nationwide after Telstra lost connectivity to its international data network,

“Customers who couldn’t access international sites were then overloading domestic sites causing major issues in accessing Australian sites as well,” said a Telstra spokesperson.

Perth-based ISP iiNet noted on its website that its customers were also affected; however, ISP’s chief regulatory officer, Steve Dalby, said the company was able to “route around” the problem.

In total: fixed-line and mobile Internet connections were affected, as well as 3 million BigPond mail, and Next G mobile services customers.

However, FatPipe Networks, the inventor and multiple patents holder of Wide Area Network (WAN) redundancy, security, and optimization products, says the Internet outage in Australia could have been avoided.

FatPipe products aggregate multiple data lines of any speed combination (DSL, Cable, E1, DS3, 3 / 4G, satellite, MPLS, etc.) from multiple ISPs to achieve the highest level of Internet/WAN resiliency and redundancy, according to a release.

"Businesses cannot afford to lose their Internet connectivity due to intermittent and unpredictable ISP failures," said CEO of FatPipe Networks, Ragula Bhaskar, Ph.D. "Line failure can cost companies from $4500 - $400,000 an hour depending on the business vertical. Customers who implement FatPipe enjoy automatic failover. If one line -- such as Telstra -- goes down, the alternate ISP will continue to failover the traffic and failover VPN, VoIP and Thin Client without losing connectivity or sessions."

FatPipe Networks specialize in creating and providing solutions when there is a Wide Area Network failure in order to maintain business continuity.

 FatPipe is also the only company that provides multiline WAN Optimization, which increases effective bandwidth between four to 10 times by accelerating traffic over multiple lines using compression, caching, Quality of Service (QoS) and deduplication techniques.