Telstra has marked the 10th anniversary of its jumbo-sized Global Operations Centre in Melbourne by throwing the doors open to media.
The GOC (as Telstra like to call it) is an impressively enormous facility which Telstra says is continuously upgraded to monitor Telstra's entire network across Australia and overseas.
To get some idea of the magnitude of the scale of monitoring required in this massive facility: the Telstra network handles almost 5 billion PSTN calls per year, 9 billion SMS messages, 10 million Telstra mobile services and over one million wireless broadband customers. The center monitors the whole core NextIP network (the IP-based backbone of all of Telstra's networks), GSM, Next G, PSTN, ADSL and cable networks.

The GOC is staffed 24/7 with dedicated teams looking after Telstra's various operations including monitoring network performance, the Next G mobile network, Bigpond Broadband, Wireless Broadband and broadcasting of content to Next G mobiles. The digital video wall measuring 24 x 2.5 metres provides an overview of the entire network along with live news feeds and weather information.

The video wall provides real time colour-coded status of the network with green indicating the network is performing adequately, yellow indicating performance issues and red indicating problems. Teams on the floor can drill-down to find the exact location of the problem within Telstra's network.

Group Managing Director Michael Rocca in the special viewing room. This is the guy who runs all of Telstra's networks. Nice guy, but at the same time you definitely wouldn't want to cross him -- he knows what he is talking about and would not be the kind of guy who could be fobbed off.

A view from the floor of the GOC showing staff monitoring various aspects of Telstra's network in real time