Break puts CBD business offline

THOUSANDS of Perth CBD Internet customers lost world access when a 100 meg Amcom data optic fibre cable failed in the City on Friday.

An Amcom spokesperson said that a port in a switch in QV1 broke … a rare event, which has happened only once previously.

The cable is a link for Internet companies operating out of QV1 to international Internet service provider Uunet in Adelaide Terrace.

Uunet is a first tier global Internet service provider for local second tier Internet companies as well as major companies and organisations including the WA Government.

It has 2000 points of presence around the globe, with owned and managed facilities in 19 countries, including Ozemail, which is a wholly owned subsidiary of Uunet and its hub in the Asia Pacific Region.

Perth based Amcom, a licensed carrier in Australia, has well over 200 kilometres of fibre optic cabling laid throughout the Perth area alone.

It provides access to hundreds of buildings in the CBD including QV1 which is favoured by high tech companies because of big spaces for cable.

The Amcom cable that failed links some 50 companies and offices on the Terrace to Uunet and many of the Internet service providers in QV1 including iiNet, said an Amcom spokesperson.

iiNet said that as soon as they were aware of the break in the service they switched to Optus and were down only 15 minutes.

The Amcom cable affected runs from the Durack Centre in Adelaide Terrace close to Uunet’s office to QV1 at the top of St George’s Terrace.

The break was reported at 7.30 am and took until 11.30 am to fix said a spokesperson for Amcom.

But the back up of data was so large by the time the link was fixed the data connections were very slow.

So Amcom engineers upgraded the cable to 200 meg to release the bottleneck.

A spokesman for the management of QV1 said a number of ISP companies are located in QV1 and licensed carriers, Optus, Telstra and Amcom have cables running through the building.

The tenants of QV1 choose which service provider they prefer.