By Jonathan Gleeson OAM, General Manager Technology Operations

While most Australians are dreaming, at 11pm each night a different kind of shift begins across the country. Vocus network and infrastructure engineers start working on a carefully planned maintenance window – the critical time when our national fibre network serving millions of Australians gets repaired, upgraded, and strengthened.

With 25,000+ kilometres of fibre backbone crisscrossing the continent and supporting connectivity to millions of customers, a single night's work is never small.

Here's a glimpse behind the scenes of what happened just last night:

Our IP Network Operations team decommissioned an end-of-life network edge router – the equivalent of performing surgery while the patient’s awake. This was carefully managed to minimise the interruption to customer services.

The same team also investigated mysterious CPU spikes on a network device caused by suspected malicious traffic inbound from the internet. They quickly identified and neutralised and blocked the threat before it could affect service quality.

Out with the old, in with the blazing fast

Meanwhile, our Transmission Operations team was busy in Melbourne, Sydney and Perth, cutting over a customer's fibre wavelength service to a new design (imagine redirecting a river while people are still sailing on it.)

They also migrated many services to our brand new, higher-performance Adelaide-to-Perth system, designed to deliver improved speeds and reliability for businesses and government agencies spanning the country.

Preventing tomorrow's outages today

Not every piece of maintenance is an emergency – in fact, it’s by doing routine, preventative maintenance that we prevent emergencies. We work overnight to ensure that we don’t have to interrupt customer services during the day when traffic is the highest.

Our Voice team upgraded software on a platform used in our voice core network, while other teams updated security appliances and network fabric devices to the newest software releases.

The unsung heroes of the night shift

Of course, through it all, the Operations Control Centre team in Melbourne kept watch – monitoring, coordinating, and ensuring that every maintenance task followed strict protocols to maintain our 99.999% uptime target.

It takes extraordinary coordination to keep Australia's telecommunications network running at peak performance. The next time you wake up to seamless connectivity, know that Vocus teams have been working through the night – no problem too big, no detail too small – to ensure you stay connected.