The post below the line of === recently appeared on a Telstra executive's LinkedIn account. It was also covered by the Australian Financial Review in an article by Media, marketing and telecommunications reporter Sam Buckingham Jones.
As a former Telstra Principal Technical Officer with 4 decades of experience in the network maintenance and implementation field, I find this 'restart' approach extremely disturbing. It fixes nothing and may have the potential to interrupt traffic to triple-zero 'emergency' calls. (That is - calls to police, fire & ambulance).
Such interruptions have previously been linked to the death of people.
How many times will Telstra merely restart equipment before actually fixing the real fault ?
If equipment requires repeated restart to clear faults, then the network owner should really be placing more scrutiny on their vendors and demanding a real fix.
Network operators should focus on quality of service, rather than just 'clearing' equipment alarms to improve KPIs. Network alarms are raised for a reason. - To notify of problems.
Fix the faults. - Don't just clear alarms to improve your statistics.
Post from the exec's LinkedIn account:“Have you tried turning it off and on again?”
Turns out, our network already has🤖🔁🔧
Telstra's SmartFix 🤖 is one of those AI capabilities that’s quietly been working in the background for years to make things better for our customers.
SmartFix uses smart telemetry from across the network 📡 to spot common issues early and, where it can, fix them automatically - sometimes by restarting equipment before a customer even realises there’s a problem.
✅ Fewer faults
⚡ Faster fixes
🙂 Less friction
This is AI doing real work, not demos or hype. And it’s a great example of our Network as a Product strategy in action - using data, software and automation to make the network itself smarter, more adaptive and more valuable 🔧📈.
We’ve been applying AI like this for a long time, embedded deep in how the network operates, with a simple goal:
👉 more reliable connectivity
👉 better experiences
👉 every day