International calls between New South Wales and overseas increased by around 570,000 calls during the APEC summit earlier this month.

According to Telstra figures, international calls increased from more than 4.39 million to more than 4.96 million calls during the week of September 3 to September 9. These figures include both fixed and mobile calls from NSW to overseas, and overseas to NSW.

Telstra Services Group Managing Director, Mr Michael Rocca, said Telstra provided enough new telecommunications infrastructure and capacity for the APEC summit to support a small town.

“The APEC summit had a real impact on international call traffic volumes, and our staff worked round the clock to install kilometres of new fibre cable, new internet services and hundreds of new phone lines to meet the massive communications requirements of APEC,” Mr Rocca said.

“We are proud to say that Telstra’s network coped very well with the traffic increase during the conference.”

Mr Rocca said several kilometres of additional fibre cable was laid in the Sydney CBD over the last month, supporting additional network capacity for the mobile and fixed networks. Telecommunications services included:

• Over 700 telephone lines,
• Significant increase in mobile network capacity in Sydney CBD,
• New ADSL broadband services; and
• New individual IP (Internet Protocol) and wideband IP networks.

“Telstra’s network investment included catering to the unique and strict requests from international visitors, such as one visiting country who wanted to operate their own network,” Mr Rocca said.

“Telstra links provided live video streaming for conference attendees to their home countries as well as to their entourages in Australia.”

Telstra’s mobile networks were also strengthened and closely monitored throughout the event.