The Problem
Parts of the Sydney CDB and metropolitan area were affected by a power outage at approximately 4.45pm on Monday 30th of March 2009. The cause of the problem was a hardware failure at one of four local substations that supply Sydney's power. Most of Sydney's CBD didn't have their phones up.
The Solution
M5's monitoring system alerted our support engineers that 7 of our clients were affected by the power outage. Within 5 minutes our provisioning team had contacted each of the 7 client's emergency contacts on their emergency contact numbers. Clients were given the following options.
- Leaving the phones as is with the mainline and individual extension calls diverting automatically to their standard voicemail greeting.
- Diverting the mainline number through to a mobile phone or other office unaffected by the power outage. Leave the individual extensions to go through to personal voicemails.
- Diverting the mainline and individual extensions through to another office or mobile phones.
The Results
Of the 7 clients impacted, 4 chose to leave the phones un-diverted as their normal business hours were 9.00am to 5.00pm. Another 2 clients requested that the mainline and all individual extensions be diverted to their other interstate offices.
The remaining client chose to have the mainline diverted to the managers mobile as each individual extension had been previously set up to divert to personal mobiles during emergency situations. When a phone looses power, or is not visible to our monitoring system, the pre-set conditions are referenced and calls to that individual number will act according to its settings. Total downtime was approximately 10 minutes.
With a traditional phone system, a power outage means no phone lines, in or out. Manual diversions would not be possible as the phone system is down. A diversion would need to be organised with you're carrier (Telstra, Optus etc). A temporary diversion like this (if you can get through) normally costs between $50- $150 depending on which phone company you are with and would normally take in the vicinity of 3-4 hours.
